People love a good tomato debate. Grape or cherry for salads? Brandywine or big beef for backyard gardens? Then there’s the ever-popular issue of storage: Should you, or should you not, put tomatoes in the refrigerator?
Science has previously told us to keep tomatoes at room temperature for optimal taste. But foodie eyebrows were raised earlier this year when research out of Germany suggested refrigeration might be OK after all. “A New Study May Have Just Changed the Advice on Storing Tomatoes in the Fridge,” exclaimed one headline. “Finally, the Question of Our Time Has Been Answered,” announced another. Well, maybe.
A study from the University of Göttingen in Germany compared the taste of three tomato varieties, or cultivars, that had been handled under conditions emulating a distributor and a retailer. Then the tomatoes were either chilled or stored at room temperature. It found that the biggest differentiator for taste was the cultivar — not storage conditions. They concluded that short-term storage of ripe tomatoes in a refrigerator did not harm the flavor, according to their work published in Frontiers in Plant Science earlier this year.
