Tips for Growing and Cooking Tomatoes

Blue Ribbon Hunter traveled to Pittston, PA for the Pittston Tomato Festival where thousands of people came out to sample delicious foods made with fresh tomatoes. One of the highlights of the festival is the tomato fight, where 250 people enter an arena and throw overripe or rotten tomatoes at each other for five minutes. Contestants must wear protective goggles that they can purchase for five dollars a piece and all of the proceeds go to food charities in the area.

But they don't just throw tomatoes at the festival; they make some really delicious foods with them. Here are some of the tips we learned about cooking with tomatoes:

• When making sauce, skim off the white foam that forms on top after boiling. This is the acid from the tomatoes and keeping it in the sauce will take away from the sweetness.

• If your tomatoes are a little underripe, add sugar to your sauce to help sweeten it.

• In season, ripe tomatoes are perfect as they are. When working with fresh ripe tomatoes, try to avoid adding much seasoning. Adjust the amount of seasoning you need in your dish by the ripeness of the tomatoes.

• Salt will pull the liquid out of the tomatoes, so when adding salt to a dish with fresh tomatoes, like bruschetta, add salt at the end to avoid a giant puddle of water at the bottom of your bowl.

• When picking out tomatoes at the grocery store, find ones that are just underripe. Leave them out on your counter for two days and they will continue to ripen.

• When growing tomatoes, plant your tomato plants in a different spot each year to make sure there are still enough nutrients in the soil for them to thrive.

• Plant your tomato plants in an area where they can get a lot of sun, however the perfect plant will have a canopy of leaves that will shade the fruit from direct sunlight.

• The winner of the "perfect tomato" contest recommends adding bone meal to the soil of your tomato plants to give them extra nutrients.

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