Don’t Buy Canned, Chopped Tomatoes
I have never understood the meaning of canned, chopped tomatoes. They rarely taste like their whole peeled cousins, and never completely break down during cooking, retaining their cuboid shape long after all other ingredients have turned into mush. The culprit? Calcium chloride.
The chemical composition is supposed to keep the tomatoes from turning into mush in the jar, but it does the job too well. Maybe you want hot chunks of unusually firm tomatoes to float in stews and sauces, but I don’t – I want my tomatoes to melt and mix. (Note: Some whole tomatoes are also processed with calcium chloride, but it’s much easier to find those that don’t. Just read the label.) Plus, using whole peeled guys means I only need to store one kind of tomato. … Take this, capitalism.
Slicing slippery peeled plum tomatoes may seem like a daunting task, but it’s actually easy to contain. Just take a clean kitchen scissors, stick them straight into the jar (as shown above) and dice the tomatoes to your desired size before adding them to your soup, stew, or sauce. If you want noticeable tomato slices, you can also do this without calcium chloride. Just reserve your chopped tomatoes and add them a little later in the cooking process. They will be large, but not too hard, and this will make your sauce taste better. (Want shredded tomatoes? Use your hands. Yes, it’s messy, but oddly enough, it acts like a catharsis.)
This story was originally published in February 2019 and updated on January 14, 2021 to follow the Lifehacker style guidelines.