Here is my favorite sauce tomato!

First I want to share a fantastic tomato I grow every year and never sell it at the Farmer’s Market. Why? Because I think it is THE BEST sauce tomato I’ve every grown and I’ve grown many varieties.

The San Marzano tomato top while my favorite sauce tomato is on the bottom

San Marzanos use to be my favorite sauce tomato but now they are numero 2. I’m selfish and save it for me to make tomato sauce out of. In fact I make a lot of tomato sauce as you can imagine and tend to mix up many varieties which tastes good. But when I get a bunch of these tomatoes, I only make sauce from them and don’t dilute them with any other tomatoes. The sauce is sweet, flavorful, rich and thick. A great base for any tomato sauce recipe.

So what variety is this tomato? It’s called Goldman’s Italian American or as I label it on my freezer bags, GIA– so I know it’s different from my other raw tomato sauce. It comes from Amy Goldman who wrote a book on tomatoes. The only hitch on this tomato is it takes all summer and fall to ripen. It takes 90 days to ripen so some years I’m picking them when they are still green before a freeze and finishing ripening them inside but not this year. This year they are huge from all the rain and ripening nicely on the vine and I have a lot of these behemoths and lots of sauce.