Canned Tomatoes and the Myth of the San Marzano

So you can see here, you can see some tomatoes on top, right? It looks nice. What?

“Or the real magic is, under here, that's where you really see everything.”

It's so nuts, how many tomatoes are? I'm really sorry. You guys want to hold it? So for her. Oh my god.

It's a good workout for sure. There's a lot of tomatoes. Wow. That was tons. It's like very treasure.

Nikki and I had each have to add a massive tomato plant into the air, and we were loaded up to our elbows in bright red fruit. It was truly amazing.

And what made it even more amazing was this was just two plants in a field full of them.

All covered in perfect red plum shaped tomatoes, but you could hardly see any of them

“until you lifted the plants up into the air.”

In the surface, it was just a carpet of green. We were visiting this tomato field because we promised you a full episode all about canned tomatoes. We of course are gastropod, the podcast that looks at food through the lens of science in history.

I'm Cynthia Graber and I'm Nicola Twilly and after having so much fun getting into the story of fresh tomatoes and how they lost their flavor last summer, we are back with a winter themed take on our favorite fruit that's really more of a vegetable. Let's do the Civil War and Galapagos turtles have to do with the development of this pantry staple.

And our San Marzano is all there cracked up to be. This episode is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for the public understanding of science technology and economics. Gastropod is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network in partnership with Dieter. We are in Lending California, a beautiful tomato field, ready to get picked.

In September, Nicola and I met Juan Rios, who is the agronomist for Stanislav's food products. We joined him in a field near Modesto in California, Central Valley. And this particular field had a bumper crop.

It was like we keep saying, amazing, it's an amazing amount of tomatoes buried under

all this green. It's really, really surprising, like a thick map of like a foot of tomatoes, two feet of tomatoes. And when he said carpet, it is exactly. It's almost like a lasagna layer of tomatoes topped with green.

I just stood on a tomato and I feel terrible. We both felt a little weird because it was impossible to walk through the field without walking on tomatoes. And why would we want to trample beautiful, perfect looking tomatoes? But for one, that's a part of the job he kind of enjoys.

You want to know actually a funny part about standing on the tomatoes is doing this enough.

“You have to walk on some of the plants itself when you're kind of cross the field.”

So I can actually start telling how heavy a crop's going to be by walking on top of it because you're not going to feel the ground. You just start floating on tomatoes. We really were just floating on gorgeous, jewel-like tomatoes. I mean, truly, this was kind of like tomato heaven, which I'd like to point out is very,

very different from what you see when you're looking at a field of eating tomatoes in Florida. As you might remember from our tomato episode last summer, Florida tomatoes, the ones that are destined for the fresh section of supermarket shelves around the country, they are all picked green and hard as a baseball. They are deliberately not ripe.

Whereas these canning tomatoes were fully ripe, which is why they were being crushed under our feet much to our devastation. Fortunately, one wasn't bothered to tell. There were just so many tomatoes already at once. That's kind of what tomatoes do.

You know, if you've grown tomatoes, you know that their habit is they come in slowly. And then all of a sudden, you get a couple of hot days and they come in like gangbusters. Bill Alexander is the author of 10 Tomatoes That Change The World.

And he says this tendency of tomatoes to gift us this incredible abundance all at once.

This was a problem in the mid-1800s when tomatoes first became super popular in the US. There would be a glut and the price of tomatoes would drop so much that they would just sometimes plow them into the fields. I know, it's horrifying. But then, and this is a story we've told on the show before, in the 1800s, the tin can came

along. Now, canning started when Napoleon sponsored a contest around 1800 for someone who could come up with a way for his troops to carry foods into battle that would not spoil. Of course, all growing things are contained within a protective covering. But it occurred to man that if he could provide a permanent protective covering for the

body of nature, he could then readily extend the harvest season until every day and the year became a day of plenty, a simple idea, but one of great promise.

We refer to it and rightly so, as the miracle of the can. But it took a while for this miraculous technology to catch on.

“There were various developments along the way, and a particularly important one was the”

invention of the can opener in the 1850s, which was perfect timing. All of this was in place now for just prior to the Civil War when tomatoes were being grown like crazy. They were already at this point, the most popular vegetable in the United States.

The first tomatoes were being put into cans in the U.S. in the 1840s.

A gentleman named Harrison Crosby of New Jersey filled metal pales with whole tomatoes, sealed them with the tindisc and boiled them. He sent samples to Queen Victoria and President James Polk, as well as to hotels and restaurants in New York. They caught on.

By the 1860s, there were factories in the north in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. These factories were producing cans, and so union soldiers could take those cans into battle as part of their Russians.

“Which were always a prize bounty for the Confederate troops who had to rely on raiding”

the towns and getting all of their food from the local population. And it was also the first time that many Americans, either in the north or the south, had tasted canned tomatoes. And so when they came out of the war, they actually wanted to keep eating them. And that's when canning really takes off after the war.

The war ended in 1865, and by 1870, a hundred canneries were producing 30 million cans

of tomatoes a year. It's nowhere near what's produced today, but tomato canning had grown exponentially in just a few years. Soon they were more tomatoes being canned than any other fruit or vegetable. And this is the moment the canned tomato becomes an icon.

Shortly after the civil war, Joseph Campbell joins this canning company in southern Jersey, flies out partner after a couple of years. And his conceit was that he wanted to make canned goods that were special. You could buy nowhere else. Joseph Campbell is in fact the Campbell of, yes, Campbell's tomato soup.

He had been working at a fruit and veg company, and then he joined a canning company as partner. And one of the things that he did was he had a single beef steak tomato, a term by the way that he owned the copyright to a single giant beef steak tomato in a can which he marketed as Campbell's celebrated beef steak tomato.

Example perhaps of one of the first like real branded foods. You can kind of picture with this canned tomato would have been like, beef steak tomatoes are known to be large and round. And the company just skinned and cooked those and stuck each one in its own can. These weren't their only products.

They also had canned vegetables called strictly fancy small peas and fancy asparagus. In the 1890s Campbell stepped down, a guy called Arthur Dorrance took over his president, and his nephew John, who was a chemist with a degree from MIT, joined the company. And he comes up with the idea of doing tomato soup, but condensed tomato soup to which you would add a can of water to, and it would reconstitute back to full soup.

And that was it, canned tomatoes created one of the very first packaged convenience foods.

“It's very easy for the housewife, whilst you have to do is open it and take that same can”

fill it with water and you have a lunch, and you have a lunch, and you have a lunch. Automados soup gives them such good nourishment and flavor.

They always eat better when you remember the soup.

Reach for the canbles, it's right on your shelf. And many of us are still doing the same thing today. The red and white Campbell soup can is still an icon. Thanks in part to Andy Warhol, who famously painted one canvas for every flavor in the 1960s. But the label wasn't originally red and white.

The early Campbell soup labels were a quite handsome, dark blue and orange. But then in the late 1890s, a guy named Herbertton Williams, he was a Campbell's employee, and apparently a football fan. He went to a pen versus Cornell thanksgiving day football game and he was inspired by the Cornell team's red and white uniforms.

He suggested that for the cans new colors, and those labels have remained red and white ever since. The late 1890s was a busy time in the life of the canned tomato, because the other thing that was happening was that lots of Italians were leaving Italy and emigrating in search of a better life.

Lots of them ended up in the US, millions and millions.

they had more money than they had in Italy, which was very poor.

They started having this nostalgia for all their products, including Can Tomatoes. Arthur Allen is the author of "Ripe," the search for the perfect tomato. These Italian immigrants were living all around the world, in the US, in Argentina, in Australia, and they wanted the tomato products they didn't back home. Last time we talked to Matto, we told you the Italians made something called "Conservanero"

with their harvest. This super super dense, thick, black, solid tomato paste. By the late 1800s, though, they'd switched to "buttle," thinner paste. Much more like what tomato paste is today, but then they started canning whole tomatoes for the British market.

Brits at this point love tomatoes that even ate them for breakfast.

“Findia, everyone knows that a grilled tomato is a key part of the full English fry-up.”

Which really got standardized at this exact time in the Edwardian era.

In some ways, tomatoes were really the first vegetable that British people appreciated.

Outside of the potato, of course. No comment. But Brits couldn't get tomatoes in the winter, which was a bummer. Until the Italians ratchet it up their canning prowess to meet the demand. And so, within only a few years, the industry had basically switched from canning paste

to canning whole tomatoes and the canning industry in Italy as a whole group, too. And although the Brits really kick-started the Italian tomato canning industry, Italian Americans hopped aboard soon after. Like, out through said, they were merrily importing tomatoes from the homeland alongside all the cheeses, and cured meats, and olive oil they missed so much.

But those tomatoes became harder to get a hold of in the 30s. First, they were tariffs.

We all know how great those are.

“And then the US was boycotting Italian products because of the fascist Italian government”

and their invasion of Ethiopia. And then Mussolini scaled down tomato production in the country in order to grow more grain so Italy could be self-sufficient. And the Italians had been shipping tomatoes to the United States, and suddenly those imports were not coming in.

And so there was this opportunity, and who better to fill that opportunity than those who knew about Italian tomatoes, the Italians. This is Jeff Lundquist, he's a regional sales manager for Stanislaus. And seeing this demand, Italian Americans had started growing tomatoes to can them in Jersey and Pennsylvania, but also increasingly in California.

Among those Italian Americans was the family that started Stanislaus. But Stanislaus doesn't sound Italian, and it's not actually their name. Ralph and Edna Quartaroli started the company in 1942. At that point, there was one more strike against Italy, it was part of the axis we were fighting in World War II.

“And having an Italian name in the United States was not the greatest thing at that time.”

So they saw that opportunity jumped into it, but they were nervous about having their names on the businesses. Everything was rationed during that time, and they were concerned that they would be last on the list to be able to buy equipment. Though the Quartaroli's name their new company after the county it was based in instead.

Stanislaus County, California. At the time, their can tomatoes were produced in a super-hands-on manner, like all the can tomatoes back then. It was mostly women and children working in the factory. They were doing things like corn, the tomatoes, and slipping skins off newly boiled tomatoes

with their bare hands. Meanwhile, in the fields, a combination of Midwestern, dustball, refugees, and Mexican immigrants picked every single fruit by hand. In World War II, California growers complained about labor shortages. To the point that the U.S. government launched something called the Bracero Program.

To bring in Mexican laborers on a temporary basis to help get the harvest in. Before this was all picked by hand into wooden crates, those wooden crates would be put into trailers, taking to the canary, like unloaded by hand, and then dumped. So I mean, that process just took a whole long time, and it's very labor intensive. This kind of work was called "stoop labor" because it was so back-breaking.

And the Bracero Program was sort of legendary for how exploitative it was. But most California tomato growers loved it because the Braceros were a cheap, easily controlled, non-union labor force. But some people looked at how much labor it took to get the tomatoes from the field and then into the can, and they thought there had to be a better way.

Mechanization would transform the tomato itself, and it had ripples throughout the entire United States. That's coming out after the Brac. At this point in history in the 1940s, the tomato was in kind of a pickle. Not a literal one, however delicious that might be, but more of an existential one.

The tomato was weak, genetically speaking. They were domesticated in Mesoamerica from only a small number of tomato plants out there in the wild, and then only some of those plants were taken to Europe and bread further, which created even more of a genetic bottleneck, and then only some of those tomatoes made it to America.

That's the kind of genomic pool that we've been working with here, probably represents less than 5% of the total tomato genome.

Meet Charlie Rick.

“Charlie Rick was head of the wonderfully named truck crop division at UC Davis, and he would”

go to South America every year.

Drake is family down there and is beat up van. And he would look for specimens of tomatoes or even relatives tomato that we didn't have here. Charlie brought back tomatoes from his adventures in South America. He grew them out at the University, and he looked for useful traits that he then breed

into tomatoes here. In fact, almost all of tomatoes you, you buy today, have some genes that were brought back to America by Charlie Rick. On one of Charlie's tomato collecting adventures, he went to the Galapagos Islands, and picked up seeds from a wild tomato there.

And he couldn't get the seeds to germinate.

He tried planning them in different kinds of soils.

He tried putting them through some finches that was that Darwin had written about. He still cannot get them to germinate.

“Some seeds need to pass through an animal's digestive tract for them to germinate.”

So it made sense that Charlie thought that the Galapagos Finches that Darwin made famous, maybe they'd get the tomato seeds going, but no. And he remembered that he had seen some Galapagos turtles wandering around the area where it's made us worried. He had a friend at the University of California in San Francisco who had some Galapagos

turtles, a couple of them, and so the friend would feed the seeds to the turtles. After about a month, because tortoises are, of course, notoriously slow and everything that they do, about a month later he would send back the scat from the tortoise. Charlie searched through the turtle poop to look for tomatoes seeds, but he couldn't find them, and he wasn't even sure which batch of poop had the seeds.

So we got the idea that he'd ask the friend to feed the turtle died lettuce leaves at the same time as the tomato seeds. It worked. When the dye showed up in the poop, there were definitely seeds there, too. And the one behold, once these seeds had passed through, the digestive system of a Galapagos

turtle, they could finally be germinated.

And you know, this would just be an amazing, I mean, it is an amazing story.

But also these tomatoes that grew out of it contain this trait, which is called jointless pedestal, and what it is, is it's something that allows the stem of the tomato to fall

“right off of the fruit, and this is key to making processing tomatoes.”

Almost every other tomato at the time had a joint in the stem, not far from the fruit. It meant that when you picked the fruit a little bit of the stem would come off with it, and that was another thing that had to be removed in the canning process. It was also a pokey thing that would stick into other tomatoes in the harvest bucket, and those holes would lead to rot.

Basically all that, but the Galapagos tomato didn't have that joint in the stem. And so the tomato would just come off cleanly right at the fruit. This jointless pedestal gene wasn't something Charlie was specifically looking for, but it was very handy, because one of his colleagues at UC Davis, this guy called Jack Hanna, he had decided he wanted to optimize the tomato harvest.

And this was one of the issues he needed to fix. He was Texas born, you know, farm kid, who was just totally, unsanomenal about farming. And, you know, it was all about efficiency, but he had this idea to create a harvestable, you know, mechanically harvestable tomato. At the time, nobody really took Jack seriously, tomatoes weren't notoriously mushy things.

You know, if you didn't like a politician, you might throw it to make it at him, and it would splat. A hard tomato that could be picked up by a machine, that sounded totally ludicrous. But Jack was not a man to be deterred by other people's lack of faith. He decided that problem needed to be tackled from two angles, somebody needed to invent

a machine, but also he needed to reinvent the tomato. The tomato had to have a lot of very specific qualities. One of them was that it had to have that jointless gene, so only the fruit would come off the stem. Ideally, it also wouldn't have a white core, because that was something canner's had

to cut out. And fortunately Charlie Rick had found a tomato that was kind of oval-shaped that had no white core. The list goes on, an optimized tomato plant should have fruit that all ripened at the same time.

That's ideal for processing, because when you go through the field, you're harvesting the whole plant, so you want as many of those tomatoes to be ripe as possible. Amazingly, the gene that made the tomatoes on a plant all ripened at the same time also had another extraordinarily useful effect. It made the tomato plant what is called "determinate", which means that rather than just

growing and fruiting and growing some more and fruiting some more all season long, which means that you have to support the plant on a trellis.

And what the idea is is that each shoot that goes off flowers produces a tomato and then

“it stops growing, so they all grow out from the center stalk to the more or less the same”

length.

And finally, Jack needed a machine harvestable tomato to be hard enough that the mechanical

harvester wouldn't smush it, so he'd breed tomatoes, he thought might be harder than usual, and he'd drop them. Like, he'd take them out on the field and drop them and he would say, well, a good one would you could drop twice before broke, you know, a really good one you could drop three times.

Meanwhile, to tackle the machine part of the mechanical harvesting problem, he worked with an engineer at Davis called Kobe Lawrence. Kobe started out with a modified potato digger, which managed to harvest a very respectable 80% of the tomatoes in a field, but left them in a single soggy muddy mass. Over the next decade, Kobe and Jack and their colleagues developed all sorts of improvements.

They went through 30 to 40 different versions of the harvester. Finally, in 1959, a farmer agreed they could try out the latest version of his fields. When they said, don't invite anybody because this is just a prototype. And when they got there, the whole field was just full of all these academics and farmers and industry people, and, of course, it made a huge mass, it made one big pile of, like,

tomato goop with mud in it and the machine would break down and the whole thing was just, you know, a mess. But Jack and Kobe were determined to succeed and they kept tweaking the machine and they eventually got it to a point where only about a quarter of the tomatoes turned into goop during the harvest, which was closer to being considered an acceptable loss, at least by some tomato

growers, including someone named Tilly Lewis. She was a pioneering businesswoman in the early to mid-1900s. She started off in the tomato business because she married a guy who was a wholesale grocery distributor and he did a lot of work with imported food from Italy, like canned tomatoes. She thought the San Marzano tomatoes that the Italians were growing and canning tasted way

better than what American farmers were growing. And then when those tariffs we talked about came along in the 1930s, she saw an opportunity.

“Why not grow the good Italian tomatoes in California?”

And her husband was like, "Nah." Experts at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden also told her this wouldn't work, but she didn't care. Tilly headed off to Italy. She met her husband's connections in the canning business.

She actually worked in a cannery for a while and then she divorced the guy and moved to Stockton in the Central Valley. And then she partnered up with an Italian American guy and they started growing San Marzano tomatoes in California. His name was Florindo Del Guiso, his family ran one of the biggest tomato canneries in

Naples and he was apparently tall, dark, and handsome.

There were rumors, but all we can say for sure is that Tilly and Florindo never married.

Their names were combined only on a tomato can. Their new company was called Flotil, from Florindo and Tilly. In any case, Florindo soon died until he was left in charge of the company. But one of the reasons that her tomato canning company could more easily adopt the new harvesters was that she was already growing longer thinner tomatoes and these were better

suited to the machines. Most everyone else was growing big round tomatoes and they couldn't be bothered switching not only to a machine, but to new tomatoes too. And she invested and bought some of these machines, so she was very important for getting this off the ground.

Tilly lived a fascinating life. She even invented some of the earliest diet foods.

“But for the rest of her story, you should go listen to our episode called Sweet and”

Low Calorie about artificial sweeteners. She was a force of nature. Gradually, other tomato canners followed Tilly's pioneering lead and got on board, especially once labor became a real issue after the end of the Bracero Program in 1964. That year, only a quarter of California's tomatoes were harvested by machine, but just two

years later it was 80%.

By 1968, the hand harvest was over, canned tomatoes were basically all harvested by machine.

Modern industry in the field, the machine Victor is a triumph of recent agricultural engineering. The machines work by digging into the dirt and scooping up the tomato plant. This is great if the fields are dry, and most of the tomato fields in California were irrigated, not rain-fed, so that irrigation could be turned off. The disadvantages in the east are that, you know, rains all the time.

Before the mechanical harvesters, there were plenty of tomato canning factories in Indiana and Maryland and New Jersey. After, nine out of every ten tomatoes grown for canning were grown in California. But that wasn't the only impact. The machines were so expensive that only large farms could afford them.

Within five years of the machine's large-scale adoption, thousands of tomato growers went out of business, only a few hundred remained, and tens of thousands of jobs were lost. Stanislaus is one of just a few big canning businesses in the Central Valley today, and they do the harvesting for their growers.

harvester.

“As you can see here, this is a tomato harvester.”

We have about seven or eight that sands all stones. We stood next to it. It is really, really big, like as big as the school bus. It has all sorts of different kinds of machinery, sticking out on either side, and what looks like a massive conveyor belt/escalator going up the entire front next to the driver

who's sitting in a covered cab. I've tried driving one of these things once very terrifying. It is all it's a big machine. You're not going to let us drive it? You can get on it.

I don't know if I'm going to let you drive it. Juan is a white man, but he did let us climb aboard and admire the machine from there. At the bottom of that massive conveyor belt, there's a kind of combo digger slicer. And really what he's doing is skimming about the first inch or two of the top slow, and it's pinching that plant off.

When that plant gets pinched off, he goes on to this belt right here, hugged by this belt

on top, and it's basically to me it always looks like a carpet of tomato plant going up.

The whole plant's roll up the conveyor belt, and a lot of the dirt falls off them. As the plants are being jostled and shaken around, this helps dislodge the tomatoes from the vine and they roll on to a different belt. That's where you get the first introduction of technology that's changed quite a bit. This is like laser ice orders, and these can be set up to see certain color, and certain

color actually activates the fingers that are down there. When you hear that, really what it is, is it's seeing red, and it's set up to see red. So as soon as it does, it's able to ignite those fingers with a little air pressure, and I'll kick the red tomatoes back in. Anything that's not red, like all the green parts of the plant, dirt and green tomatoes,

that gets shaken down into a shredder, and then a vacuum hose sucks up any loose debris. And it'll shoot that into the shredder as well, and then hop the back.

Never want to stand behind a tomato machine while it's moving.

One has learned this the hard way. Oh, it's a game for some of these guys sometimes. Whenever I'm driving by the machine like that, there's like, oh, let me turn it on, and you get painted green. The tomatoes pass along the length of this machine, and along the way, there are a couple

more swortos, all kicking out anything that isn't a perfect red tomato. All these lasers and scanners, they weren't on Jack Hanna and Kobe Lawrence and the original machine. Before, there would be about 14 people on the machine, and what they were doing is they would be going even slower, but they were hand sorting everything.

So that way, you're still getting only red into the tub, but it was on manual labor. Still less labor than harvesting by hand, but a lot more than today. One explained how this all works while the harvester was idle, because once it gets going, it's really loud. We were standing next to the sorter when he told the driver to start up the engine and

get digging. And just like that, the machine rumbled off, sucking up all the plants in its path, and all the right-bread tomatoes came rolling down the belt's beside us.

“We have video on our socials, it's quite astonishing, honestly.”

Even watching it with the naked eye, you barely see it going on, but when you watch it in slow motion, and you see the little lasers kicking everything off, and anything that's not a red-ribed tomato is booted out right in the field. I could have honestly stood there all day, watching this huge machine lumber up and down the rows of tomatoes, sucking up entire plants, pooping out dirt and leaves, and raining

down beautiful, perfect ruby red tomatoes into huge bins on a truck that follows along. It was mesmerizing. The machine itself is, as Nikki said, astonishing. Then I was also shocked to learn that during the season, which is only a little more than two months, these machines are running all the time.

The machine runs 24 hours, 70 as a week, just like the cannery does. It's intense, the only break these machines really get is kind of cleaning up before shift change. All of this sounds extremely industrial, and as though efficiency has triumphed yet again over taste.

That's the story of fresh tomatoes for sure, but it's not the story of canned ones. Why canned tomatoes are actually the greatest and tastiest pantry staple, and how to make sure you're getting the most delicious ones after the break. We told you that Jack Hanna and other people at the time, and since then, who've been breeding the perfect tomatoes for canning, had some very specific tomato features in

mind, and none of them were about flavor. But that's not the whole picture. Tom Quartapassi, he's the president of Stanislas, he told us what his breeders focus on.

Well, first off, it has to be able to handle that harvester, right?

So it has to have enough firmness. They also, you notice they kind of all ripen at once. So far, so similar to Jack Hanna, but that's not all canned tomato breeders are looking for. From a tomato standpoint, the varieties that we choose have a lot of flavor, a nice balance

“of sugar and acid, that's what gives you that when you bite in tomato, you get both,”

like any good food, it's balanced.

to verify that.

You guys won't take a bite?

Yes. Yes. How about it, dear?

“The first thing to point out here is that all canning tomatoes are harvested ripe, so they're”

at their full flavor potential. That helps. And wanted brought a little salt for us, but also helps. Oh, I know that you brought salt for us. Perfect.

Thank you. Really good. Yum. It still had that heat from the field. It was ripe.

It was juicy. It was good tomato. It was a little firmer than the ones I grow or pick up at the farmers market. That's because, as we said, they're bred to be able to make it through the mechanical harvesting without getting smooshed.

So I wouldn't necessarily choose it for my salad. But it still tasted like a tomato. Much more tomatoy than the fresh eating tomatoes you buy at the store out of season. In a way, can tomatoes got lucky. We mentioned in the fresh tomato episode the summer that flavor accidentally got bred

out of Florida tomatoes, as they were being bred to be hard and shipable and something that could be picked green and ripe in the later.

That never happened to the varieties of tomatoes that are grown for canning.

They were intensively bred to be machine harvestable, but the flavor jeans came along for the ride. And honestly, we are all grateful for that stroke of luck. Stenislas is a canning company that only sells to other companies. You can't buy their products at the grocery store.

And Jeff told us the main way they try to distinguish themselves is taste. Our customers are our restaurant tours. We're trying to help the mom and pop ones you choose the restaurant owner to have superior flavor over chain operations that can have price advantage.

“So we want to give them flavor advantage and that's why flavor is so important to us.”

Lots of things go into flavor, including the tomato variety and how it's grown, but Stenislas's big edge is to do with how they process the tomatoes. You, like me, have probably eaten can tomatoes and tomatoes, or as your whole life without ever realizing there's a big divide in the world of can't tomato products. And it's to do with how they're processed.

Three out of every four tomatoes that get harvested in California, make it to industrial paste, which is kind of tomato sludge. And they take that paste and they make other sauces, barbecue sauce, soups, things like that. We do no paste, no paste, zero. So it's all just fresh pack tomatoes here.

There's industrial paste and there's fresh pack.

And from the way Tom and Juan talked about it, it's pretty much a case of never-the-twincial

meat. And you're like us and these terms are new to you, let's start with paste processing. Jeff told us the first part is the same, the harvest. And then you're going to bring the product into the plant and you're going to cut it up and juice it and you're going to take that juice and you're going to evaporate it until

you just have a very, very thick, thick paste, thicker than you would buy in the store. And they're going to put that paste in a big tote and they're going to set it aside. In the 1970s, a scientist at Purdue, whose family worked in the tomato-canning business, invented this ACeptic storage system. He figured out that if you quoted steel tanks with epoxy resin and sterilized all your equipment

and filled any air gaps with nitrogen gas, you could store tomato paste at room temperature from months and months. He won the World Food Prize for this breakthrough and ended up revolutionizing the juice industry as well as the canned tomato business. Jeff told us that today, companies will put their tomato paste in 300 gallon ACeptic

bags that are stored in plastic bulk storage boxes. Then what they will do is when the season is over, they will bring that product back into the plant and they will heat it again and then they will add water to it and they will make a sauce. Like pizza sauce, pasta sauce or ketchup, soup, barbecue sauce, whatever tomato product

a company wants to make. Heinz used tomatoes for tomato soup, tomato ketchup. The famous sauce for baked beans and also of a spaghetti. Like I said, 75% of the tomatoes are done that way. The main bulk of the tomatoes is that it into tomato puree.

Love this stuff. This is the split in the canning industry. The other side, the side Stanislaus is on, they do something called fresh pack. They don't make paste and store it and reconstitute it later in the year. They just put the tomatoes in the can after harvest.

A fresh pack plant has to be big enough to process all the tomatoes they want to package in that short window of time, those tomatoes are ripe. And then that whole huge factory sits idle, the entire rest of the year.

“That's why these kinds of tomatoes are more expensive.”

But this process also has an impact on flavor. And so it has one cook versus most industries doing two cooks. That one cook, that's because all canned tomatoes have to be cooked for a certain amount of time to kill off any pathogens and sterilize them.

These makers cook their tomatoes twice, as Jeff said, and they cook them for a long time. That really changes the flavor of the tomatoes. But the folks at Stanislaus do it differently.

“A very important formula for us is that time and temperature are the enemy of fresh tomato”

flavor.

So we're always trying to manage that to reduce the time, reduce the temperature.

What that means is that the tomatoes go from that monster machine in the field to the plant in no more than a couple of hours. Then they try to get them out of the plant in a can in the next four hours. So six hours total from growing in the field to sitting in a can. We followed them over to the plant to see what happened next.

We're ever in the plant. Oh, it smells amazing. Now I'm done a hungry smell that's motto. We work in fair belts of tomatoes all around us. So it's just two rivers of red going down to this escalator of the end, we're climbing

up into our plant. I absolutely love the roller coaster going up, they're going down, they're going across, they're going round, luckily not quite as fast, doesn't really roll a coaster. The tomatoes get thoroughly washed, of course, and there are various scanners and humans doing quality controller all points.

But the first stop from most of the tomatoes is this incredibly clever machine that uses steam and rubber fingers to get the skin off. So we can see that tiny little bits of tomato skin coming off there smells like cooked tomato now and it's so clever, they're just gently being rubbed by these rubbery fingers. And then we watch the tomatoes come out the other end after all the skin had been removed.

Oh my gosh. You know, they are the make it's skinless tomatoes, they look like make it's skinless tomatoes, but like beautifully perfect make it's skinless tomatoes, like surprisingly perfect. Stanislas makes a bunch of different canned tomato products, they package those beautiful tomatoes whole and a bunch of tomato juice and sauce made from less than perfect looking

tomatoes, they sell cans of crushed tomatoes, they even make their own sauces, but definitely not reconstituted from paste. At this point in our tomato journey, it felt like time to eat again.

“We tried the tomato in the field, it was delicious, but how about once it was in the can?”

Could we really taste that fresh packed difference? Stanislas has a company kitchen on site and a chef who works there and the chef had prepared a number of different dishes for us. One of them was a plate that had just one perfect canned tomato with some mozzarella, basil and olive oil.

I've never seen a mini Caprizi salad made of canned tomatoes before.

I had not either, and frankly, I admired the Hutspa. I mean, this is a dish supposed to showcase the most perfect summer tomatoes. All right, I'm going to, I mean, I'm going to start with tomato, because it's the main event here. It's got a little bit of olive oil and a little bit of basil, that is unnaturally delicious. It is so so pure tomato.

I'm also really impressed with the texture of it, just even cutting into it. It has a little give, but you can cut it really easily. It's like a really lovely texture tomato. And it doesn't have any of that solid core that you can get. It's just an all tomato all the way through.

Pure red, the color is intense. It's very beautiful, here we go. Mmm, that is a delicious tomato. This was actually kind of mind-blowing. A canned tomato served where you would normally have a fresh one,

and it was just as if not more delicious. They served us their sauces in a few different dishes too, and those were also super delicious. Now, here's where we have to disappoint you listeners, though, because we did tell you, but here's a reminder. Stanislaus only sells to restaurants and food companies.

Their cans are a full gallon each can, more than six pounds of tomatoes in there. Whereas a large can in the store is that just under two pounds. Sorry, I am considering doing some kind of deal with my neighborhood pizza restaurant.

“That said, honestly, the canned tomatoes in the store are all pretty good.”

But for people who are looking to get the very most delicious canned tomatoes,

the advice you always hear is by San Marzano tomatoes, they're the best.

The San Marzano is kind of pretty mythical. The story behind the San Marzano goes like this. As we discussed in our tomato episode this summer, tomatoes in general took a while to catch on in Italy. But when they did, they were huge hits.

But as Italians started canning whole tomatoes to supply the British market, they started planting a new variety. It was a cross between two traditional varieties that have been developed up north near Parma. This new variety was the legendary San Marzano of tradition, which means it's really only a century old.

A tomato canner who lived up north brought the seeds of this hybrid to southern Italy for a few reasons. The volcanic soils near Vassuvius were incredibly rich.

And some farmers were willing to give these new tomatoes a try.

“Within a couple of years, the San Marzano was the tomato.”

Everyone in the region was growing it, it was being exported. People like Tilly Lewis were falling in love with it. It was the bedrock of Italy's tomato canning industry. They saw it as red gold. For a few decades, things were going swimmingly.

And then disaster struck, Arthur told us the story. What happened in Italy was that in the '60s and '70s, the San Marzano just became subject to all of these molds and wilts and critters. And it was going to go extinct. Time for a new tomato to come to the rescue.

The authentically Italian sounding Roma.

The Roma was actually developed in the U.S. And so, yeah, I mean, it sounds like what could be more Italian. Seriously, but no, it was developed at a USDA facility in Maryland. The Roma does have some San Marzano among its many tomato parents. But other tomatoes were involved too.

And it was bred to be resistant to all those molds and wilts. So Italian growers mostly switched to that. Today, Stanislaus and most other canners have moved on to even newer hybrids. Though even those have both Roma and San Marzano's in their ancestry. In the 1990s, the slow food movement, it was founded in Italy just a few years.

Before, they wanted to bring the original San Marzano's back. But when they went looking for San Marzano's being grown near Naples, they found 20 different kinds of tomatoes all being called San Marzano. What had happened since the days of Brits enjoying San Marzano's with their fried breakfasts and Tilly importing them to the U.S.?

What had happened is that Italian tomato growers had let their tomato plants have lots of indiscriminate sex, nobody was monitoring the purity of the San Marzano line. Some San Marzano survived the bugs and wilts, and likely either accidentally or on purpose were cross-bred with other local tomatoes. And so people were growing those and calling them all San Marzano's.

Which was a problem for the slow food people. Slow food ended up just choosing to live the many so-called San Marzano's being grown and calling those the official San Marzano tomato. And the growers in the region also got something called a protected designation of origin, a pedio, or DOP depending on which language you're speaking.

That means that all canned tomatoes labeled San Marzano DOP have to be one of those two veritals grown in this one specific region near Naples. But even if you buy a can of tomatoes labeled San Marzano DOP, they might not actually be one of those two varieties or grown in that region. For one, there's only a tiny, tiny amount of land dedicated to San Marzano's.

And so there's way more demand than supply that creates an incentive for fraud. There's not that many, there are some that come from that region in Italy.

“We don't think many come to this country because why would they?”

They're going to keep them in Italy. The other issue is that if you're buying San Marzano DOP tomatoes in the U.S., well, it's not actually fraud to label them DOP even if they're not grown in the region, because the U.S. does not honor European DOP regulations. So it's certainly possible that those San Marzano's you buy at the store might not be

San Marzano's according to the letter of the DOP. It's really impossible to know, but they still might be delicious. So if looking for the label San Marzano isn't going to guarantee peak deliciousness, what should you look for? What's the winter tomato lover to do?

First off, you want to buy whole canned tomatoes if possible.

That way your tomatoes definitely won't be reconstituted from paste. If you see a can and it's you open it up in their hole, yeah, there's no other way of doing it. You can't preserve the tomato and then repack it whole. So that's the one item when it's, you know, when it's the actual hole tomato you know.

“But crushed and diced can be even more convenient to use than whole ones in a can, how about those?”

As you cut up those tomatoes and you create different products, you're getting further and further away from the garden. Diced tomatoes is obviously going to be a tomato that doesn't need to have the visual aspect that a whole peeled tomato because it can, you can just cut it up and you don't know that, you know, it didn't look great. You're also going to use a firm on a calcium chloride to firm that tomato up because

the tomato when it's cut in those little squares is not going to retain that shape on its own. Calcium chloride is a kind of salt. It's a common food additive, you'll often find it in cans of beans too. So they put that calcium chloride in there and that'll firm it up and give that identity. Some people can taste that and it's kind of a chalky taste if you can pick it up. That would not have the same quality and sweetness so you would get with a whole peeled tomato.

Crushed and ground tomatoes don't have calcium chloride added, they don't need it. But they could be reconstituted from paste. Some are. For sauces, you have to look at the ingredient list.

parentheses paste and water, then that means it was re-manufactured. Most of everything on the grocery store shelf is that way. Not everything. I didn't know to look for this before we reported this

episode, but I was happy to see that my favorite sauce, basically the only one we buy,

“it's clear that it's not reconstituted. That might be why I like it so much. But honestly,”

even the cheapest, most basic reconstituted from paste can tomato product is still a good thing.

That's because like we said, counting tomatoes never had the flavor bred out of them

and they're allowed to ripen before they're harvested. And that is why we love them.

“I think a can of tomatoes is one of the most underrated cheap products you can buy.”

I'm into that. Honestly, if there's one tip we could give you for winter cooking,

it's to always keep canned tomatoes around. We are not being paid by big tomato.

“We do genuinely believe that they're the greatest.”

Thanks this episode to the folks at Stanislaw's Food Products. On Reost on Quartipassie, Jeff Lundquist and Peaches Brady, you can find their product at all the best pizza restaurants. And thanks to Alec Wassen for connecting us to them. Thanks also to Arthur Allen and Bill Alexander. We have links to their books on our website gastropod.com. Thanks also to our fantastic producer Claudia Gaud. We'll be back in a couple of weeks.