Why Tomatoes Kept In Fridge Lose Their Flavour?

The tomato hitching a ride home in your grocery bag today is not the tomato it used to be. No matter if you bought plum, cherry or heirloom. If you wanted the tastiest tomato, you should have picked it yourself and eaten it immediately. That’s because a tomato’s flavor – made up of sugars, acids and chemicals called volatiles – degrades as soon as it’s picked from the vine. There’s only one thing you can do now: Keep it out of the fridge. Researchers at the University of Florida have found in a study, published on 17 October in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that when tomatoes are stored at the temperature kept in most refrigerators, irreversible genetic changes take place that erases some of their flavours forever. Researchers took two varieties of tomatoes – an heirloom and a more common modern variety – and stored them at 41 degree Fahrenheit before letting them recover at room temperature (68 degrees Fahrenheit). When they looked at what happened inside the tomatoes in old temperatures, the subtropical fruit went into shock, producing especially damaging changes after a week of storage. After they were allowed to warm up, even for a day, some genes in the tomatoes that created its flavor volatiles had turned off and stayed off. Most of the tomatoes we eat are plucked from their vines just as they start to ripen. They are sorted, sized, graded and packed into a box with other tomatoes. Then they stay in humidity and temperature controlled room (no less than 55 degrees Fahrenheit) and ingest ethylene, a gas to make them ripen, for two to four days before being transported to a warehouse. There they are repackaged, re-sorted and shipped to your grocer. There, if demand is low or if there’s no room, they may be stored in a fridge, and by the time you get them, it’s been a week to ten days.