Stuffing Tomatoes

Enlarge Image Image Gallery Stuffing tomatoes come in a rainbow of colors and shapes. DAVID CAVAGNARO

I hated them. The juice from the tomato and its thin walls would turn everything into a mushy mess.

Things would have been different if Mom had known about stuffing tomatoes: varieties developed specifically for that purpose. Resembling bell peppers, stuffing tomatoes are thick-walled, hollow and relatively juice-free. "When you slice one open, the seed gel is in the middle and the rest is hollow," says Marianne Jones, who stocks seed for nine different stuffers at Marianna's Heirloom Seeds, in Dickson, Tenn. "Sales are not big," she says, "but that's only because people don't know about them and how much fun they are."

Stuffing tomatoes are more popular with chefs — when they can get them — than with the gardening public. Chefs like them because they make beautiful, decorative presentations for both cold and hot dishes.

Even without widespread popularity, stuffing tomatoes come in incredible ranges of size, shape and color. On one end of the continuum are varieties like `Coursen Roy's,' a large, reddish-orange tomato with a fairly standard round shape, albeit slightly taller than it is wide. On the other end is 'Zapotec Pink Pleated,' a heavily ribbed, double-bowled tomato that's a true pink color. 'Zapotec Pink' looks as if two smaller, fig-shaped tomatoes were stuck together. 'Schimmeig Striped Hollow' looks like a striated 'Delicious' apple — red with yellow and orange markings.

Most of the stuffers, however, look like lobed bell peppers and come in single colors, such as 'Yellow Stuffer' and 'Orange Stuffer,' which are the most commonly available varieties. They are configured inside like bell peppers, as well. When you cut the top off, you'll find the seed mass forms a "strawberry" just under the stem. The rest is hollow, except for a few ribs in some varieties. The flesh is thick and moist, but not runny.

Stuffers, according to Darrell "The Tomato Man" Merrell, are among the earliest tomato cultivars. "They're almost all from Mexico originally," the Tulsa, Okla., resident says. "Precontact Aztecs were great tomato cultivators, much more so than South American tribes — even though tomatoes originated there."

Lacking the broad appeal that attracts large-scale commercial growers, stuffing tomatoes have been kept going primarily by amateur growers, small market farmers and specialty seed houses. They are showing up now in mainstream seed catalogs. The chart, A Super Selection of Stuffing Tomatoes, includes 11 varieties and four mail-order sources.