Best Italian Tomato Varieties to Grow and Cook With (14 Picks)

Quick Summary: The essential Italian tomato varieties for home gardeners who love to cook. Includes paste tomatoes for sauces, beefsteaks for salads and sandwiches, and specialty varieties for drying and storage. Tips on growing, container gardening, and troubleshooting. From a farmer who grows heirloom tomatoes at HeathGlen Farm.

Jump to: Why Italian? | 14 Best Italian Varieties | How to Grow | Container Growing | Troubleshooting Tomato Growing | Cooking & Preserving | FAQ

If you love Italian cooking, you know that the tomato makes or breaks the dish. A good pasta pomodoro or caprese salad depends entirely on tomato quality. The problem is that the best Italian varieties rarely appear in American grocery stores. The solution is to grow your own.

At HeathGlen Farm, I’ve grown dozens of Italian heirloom varieties over the years. Some are perfect for sauce, some for fresh eating, some for drying.

This guide covers the 14 varieties I recommend most, plus how to grow them whether you have a backyard garden or just a balcony with some containers.

For a broader look at heirloom tomatoes across all colors and origins, this guide to heirloom tomato flavor profiles covers 40+ varieties with tasting notes.

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The Importance of Tomatoes in Italian Cooking

The tomato is the quintessential ingredient for Italian cooking, whether it be used in a country tomato sauce, a green dinner salad, or an elegant braciole for the holidays.

The first Westerners to lay eye upon the domesticated tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) were the Spanish conquistadores, who found Aztecs using it in their cooking when they arrived in Mexico in the 16th century.

By 1544, tomatoes had definitely reached Italy, although at this point these “pomi d’oro”, or “golden apples”, were considered more of a decorative type of eggplant than a food. They were much more acidic than our modern tomatoes, and folks figured they were toxic.

Things changed around the late 1600s, when vegetables in general became more popular. The people of Italy never looked back, and the tomato (now “pomodoro”), which happens to grow wonderfully in the Mediterranean climate, soon became a staple food.

Nowadays, Italy is the biggest tomato producer in Europe. It has dozens of the most famous heirloom tomato varieties to its name (San Marzano, anyone?!) and this super-healthy vegetable-fruit features heavily in its internationally beloved local cuisine.

Although there are regions in Italy where tomatoes aren’t all that popular, many classic Italian and Italian-American dishes make them their superstar. Where would we be without pasta pomodoro, bruschetta, and caprese salad?

No surprise, then, that tomatoes are also the superstars in an Italian kitchen garden.

Interested in growing a complete Italian kitchen garden? Check out this detailed guide to designing and growing an Italian Kitchen Garden.

14 Popular Italian Tomato Varieties

Not all tomatoes are made equal, although they all started out as a pea-sized berry naturally found in Ecuador and Perú. When tomatoes first arrived in Italy, they were already domesticated, but the Italians really ran wild with them.

There are different Italian tomatoes for different cooking applications. Plum tomatoes, like the Principe Borghese shown below, for example, are great for sauces because they have fewer seeds and a lower moisture content.

For an Italian kitchen garden, I recommend growing at a minimum one type of paste tomato and one type of slicer tomato. Between these two types of tomatoes, you can prepare most Italian recipes!

You can have a look at my post on the best seed catalogs for heirloom tomatoes for tips on how to find your favorite tomato varieties.

How To Grow Italian Tomatoes

Seed Starting

First up is ordering your seeds. Specialty seed catalogs, like Seeds from Italy, import authentic heirloom varieties directly from Italian seed banks.

I have been growing Italian varieties of tomatoes along with other vegetables for the Italian kitchen garden for over a decade at HeathGlen Farm, and this guide to the best seed catalogs for heirloom tomatoes and vegetables has served me well.

If you’d like to grow tomatoes in your Italian kitchen garden, keep in mind that they like warm weather. Most growers, especially in colder climates, prefer starting their tomato seeds indoors.

Once you find out your local last frost date, you can sow yours 6-8 weeks before the last expected frost.

Once the risk of frost has passed and the soil temperature is getting nice and toasty (60-70 °F), you can repot the tomato seedlings and start getting them used to outdoor weather before transplanting (referred to as hardening them off).

Container Growing

You can grow some Italian tomatoes in a containers. It’s a great option for those urban gardeners who are short on space.

Determinate Tomatoes for Containers

The trick for all but the largest containers is to pick a determinate tomato type (that would be Fiaschetto or Principe Borghese from the list above).

Determinate tomatoes don’t grow in a vining manner and thus don’t need nearly as much space, nor do they usually require trellising. They produce their entire crop at once rather than throughout the season.

Growing Vining (Indeterminate) Tomatoes in Containers

If you’re going to be growing indeterminate (vining) tomatoes in pots, your plants will need some support.

You can learn more in the full guide post on trellising, staking, and fencing tomatoes.

Harvesting

As mentioned, determinate tomatoes will have a prolific yield in a short time, usually over a period of 6 weeks. This happens 60-100 days after germination depending on the variety. Be ready for a tomato tsunami! You might want to check the storage and freezing section below.

Indeterminate tomatoes start producing after the same amount of time, but once they start, they don’t stop until frost kills them off. You’ll get a constant trickle of tomatoes all summer long rather than a flush of tomatoes over a several week period.

Troubleshooting Common Problems

Although growing your own tomatoes isn’t difficult and anyone can do it, it’s still possible to run into problems on the way, especially in the delicate seedling stage.

Luckily, you’ll be able to save your tomato plants in most cases. And if you don’t, then at least you learned something for next time!

Cooking with Italian Tomatoes

Now here’s the good part! Once you’ve obtained your very own homegrown tomatoes, the world of Italian and Italian-inspired cooking is at your fingertips. The best part? All of these dishes will taste so much better than if you were to prepare them with watery, flavorless supermarket tomatoes.

For more ways to cook with tomatoes beyond Italian dishes, browse this full collection of heirloom tomato recipes.

Storing and Preserving

After harvesting your tomatoes they will last a few days on the counter (thinner-skinned heirloom varieties will deteriorate more quickly than hybrid varieties).

I don’t recommend refrigerating tomatoes, as this can seriously affect their texture, making them “mealy”. The green tomatoes you harvest at the end of season can be refrigerated however.

Because they don’t last very long when fresh, getting a tomato bumper harvest can be a bit intimidating. Fear not! There are endless ways to store tomatoes for future use in your (Italian) recipes.

One of my favorite ways to use end-of-the-season tomatoes is to dry them and then grind them into tomato powder for year-round flavor in sauces and rubs.

Classic ways to preserve tomatoes include freezing and/or drying, but there are so many creative options for preserving the tomato harvest. Check out this category on preserving garden produce for a ton of ideas.

FAQ

If you want to grow your own tomatoes for recipes like this, The Tomato Workbook for Beginners, covers everything from seed starting to harvest, with variety recommendations for different cooking uses.

You can purchase a digital copy from this website, or purchase a print copy from Amazon. Both are $11.95.