Orange Tomatoes!

Orange tomatoes are one of the many benefits of heirloom gardening. Just looking at them reminds me how much we need to work on preserving biodiversity. I don't think I've ever seen an orange tomato in the grocery store, or even in a market stall. Few of the heirloom seed suppliers I looked at this year had orange tomato cultivars, so it's well worth devoting space to these plants in the garden. For 2012 I chose one variety to try, but if you look around there are a handful of other possibilities.

I was very pleased to find 'Jaune Flamme' Tomatoes from Hawthorn Farms in Palmerston, Ontario. The name translates as "flame yellow," but they are actually the size and colour of small apricots.

Jaune Flamme is a French heirloom tomato. According to the Seed Savers Exchange (SSE) these tomatoes were made available commercially by Tomato Growers Supply Company in 1997. They aren't perhaps the best known variety, but from what I could glean about them online they do seem to be catching on.

The fruit grows in dense clusters of tomatoes about 2 inches in diameter, and weighing on average 3-4 ounces each. The skin is yellow-orange, and the flesh is mottled red. The taste is described as sweet, yet tangy. Some reviews say it tastes a bit spicy, some that it has a citrus flavour or that it reminds them of apricots. It is a popular tomato for eating out of hand, and it looks great cut in a salad or on a platter of raw vegetables. It is also said to be a great tomato for drying, a fact that was mentioned in a "Cream of the Crops" column in Mother Earth News.

Jaune Flamme is supposed to be a prolific and early producer. If all goes well we'll begin harvesting in mid-July - earlier if these warm temperatures keep up. The indeterminate vines will continue bearing fruit for many weeks. We'll likely eat many of them fresh alongside other garden produce, but I'm thinking these beauties will be giving my dehydrator a good workout.

I love the idea of preserving Jaune Flamme tomatoes in oil for use as sun-dried tomatoes in Italian dishes. I also want to try leaving some of them on the plump side, and keeping them handy for snacking and baking. They might even make their way into a trail mix for the girls to bring when they pack a lunch and go off to cadets. And won't jars of orange tomatoes look fabulous on a sunlit kitchen shelf! (I'm not even mentioning the recipe I've saved for making golden copper tomato sauce...)

This content is copyrighted. Please feel free to share by sending others a link to this page, or contact the author about purchasing reprint rights. Photo by Lynn Gardner, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license. (Her orange tomatoes were mostly Sungold.)