For the serious fanatic, nothing beats perfect, summer fresh tomatoes from the home garden or farmers market. Greenhouse tomatoes are still pretty darned tasty, depending on the variety and growing process. For a flavor enhancer, it’s easy to upgrade canned tomatoes by cooking them to the point of caramelization. But what about fresh ones? There’s salt, of course, but the other pantry staple you should be sprinkling on your tomatoes may come as a surprise: sugar.
Yep, sugar is one of many ways to boost the flavor of tomatoes. Adding sugar to pasta sauce is common, so why not sprinkle it directly on a fresh tomato? It works particularly well with overly bitter or acidic tomatoes that may not be at peak flavor and is often ideal in the off-season when they need a little kick. That said, many people enjoy a sprinkle of sugar on “perfectly good” summer ripe tomatoes — it is a common practice in the Southern United States and parts of Europe, China, and Korea. A sprinkle of sugar on ripe tomatoes makes them taste sweeter, of course, but also a little juicier with a more full-bodied flavor profile.
Why and how you should put sugar on your fresh tomatoes
Tomatoes have a high content of citric and malic acids, and a little bit of sugar can help balance them out. While adding sugar doesn’t actually lower the acid levels in a tomato, it does affect how your taste buds perceive the highly acidic, bitter flavor, making them work more harmoniously together on the tongue. A little sugar can even take a bitter, not-sufficiently-juicy, underripe tomato from close-to-inedible to, well, pretty darned good. Try it on a less-than-perfect slice and see what you think. Just the smallest bit of sugar is a whole new taste experience.
Adding sugar to counteract a tomato’s acidity works the way a pinch of salt fixes a bitter cocktail — and is delicious on a slice of watermelon or even a halved grapefruit. Salt will increase the sweet and sour flavors and make the bitterness less intrusive. That’s why a sugar and salt mixture is ideal to improve the tomato flavor. They both ratchet up the sweet quotient and constrict the bitter, but the sugar is helpful to smooth out the sour acidity that only salt couldn’t quite handle. If you want to enhance a particularly unruly bitter and sour tomato, hit it with a two-step process. Slice the tomato and add a small pinch of salt and a light dusting of refined sugar. Let it sweat for 5 to 10 minutes, flip it over, and do the same. The process will draw out water and make a bummer tomato taste pretty good.
