Cherokee Purple tomato
Solanum lycopersicum · Fruit vegetable
Top 10 pairings
Cherokee Purple is a celebrated American beefsteak heirloom, a medium-to-large slicing tomato that ripens to a dusky purple-pink and brick-rose body shading to dark, almost olive green-brown shoulders. Its dense brick-red flesh is famous for a rich, sweet, smoky and intensely savoury flavour, and the variety became one of the best loved of the dark heirlooms after it was introduced in the early 1990s from seed said to have come down through the Cherokee people.
Picking a good onedrag
UnderripeOverripe
Just ripeBuy itThe one to carry home. Firm enough to slice clean for salads and sandwiches.
ColourPink to light red, even
FleshFirm, yields to firm pressure
StemGreen calyx, clean dry scar
SmellFaint green-leaf note
Reading a just ripe one. Move the slider and the rest of this page — nutrition, pairings — updates with it. These cues are Tomato's, and hold across its varieties; where this one differs, its own page says so.
What you get from one
91%
Edible part
123 g · core and stem end out
135 g
Weight each
each one
65%
Juice
650 ml a kilo, sieved
Keeping ittap a temperature
Keep it at 10-13 C, never in the fridge. Below 10 C it turns mealy and loses aroma for good.
90-95%
Humidity
Loose, single layer
Airflow