also contributes to the flavors of ripe
strawberries and pineapples). Most
supermarket tomatoes are picked and shipped
while still green and artificially stimulated to
redden by treatment with ethylene gas (p.
351), so they have little ripe-fruit flavor, and
in fact have become a byword for flavorless
produce. However, parts of Europe and Latin
America prefer to make salads with less
fruity, more vegetable-like mature green
tomatoes, and people in many regions cook
(or pickle) and enjoy green tomatoes for their
own kind of savoriness. And in rural Peru, the
prized varieties of both tomato and tomatillo
are frankly bitter.
Cooked Tomatoes When fresh tomatoes are
cooked down to make a thick sauce, they gain
some flavors — notably rose-and violet-like
fragments of the carotenoid pigments — but
they lose the fresh “green” notes provided by
unstable fragments of fatty acids and by a