I love it when a plan comes together. I am swamped by tomatoes of every shape, size and colour: from fat ribbed Costoluto beefsteaks to tiny sweet yellow cherries. It is a delight to pick them and positively heavenly to bite into the plump fruit and feel it explode into a firework of flavour - that perfect balance of sweet and acid that only a home-grown tomato can give you.
Tomato flavour is measured in Brix: the higher the Brix rating, the sweeter the tomato. If you want the technical details, one degree Brix equals one gram of sucrose per 100g juiced tomato (a percentage, in other words).
Each variety has its own Brix rating and they vary wildly, from supersweet, high Brix rated cherries to sultry, savoury Russian and beefsteak tomatoes. Most fall between the 4-10 degree mark: one or two very sweet tomatoes hit 12 degrees Brix, with most modern varieties somewhere between 7-10 and the old flavour-filled heirlooms and beefsteaks coming in around 4-6.
You can also affect a tomato’s Brix rating by the way you water or feed it, and even what soil you grow it in.
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