For Better Tasting Tomatoes, Dip Them in Warm Water Before Chilling

Legend has it, tomatoes must stay on the countertop. Claire Lower, Lifehacker’s senior food editor, famously refuses to put them in the fridge. Sadly, not everyone has the space or the wisdom to keep them elsewhere, so they get tossed in the cold box. And while is no fallacy that chilly temps can make tomatoes taste subpar, storing them in the fridge could keep them from spoiling.

The fear that the flavour, texture, and colour could suffer from refrigeration is understandable, but there’s a simple way to avoid it: Help your tomatoes retain their flavour with a dip in warm water before chilling them.

As plant physiologist Jinhe Bai noted in research presented at a meeting of the American Chemical Society (summarized by Quartz):

The group from the U.S. Department of Agriculture took tomatoes fresh off the stem and placed them in 125-degree-Fahrenheit water for five minutes, let them return to room temperature, and then went through the normal process of chilling the fruit.

The heated tomatoes retained more of their flavor and, according to Bai, tasted better than those that weren’t heated before chilling.

The folks at Food52 did a blind taste test of two tomatoes from the supermarket, both refrigerated overnight—but only one of them was subjected to the warm water bath first. Eight of the 10 testers found the pre-warmed tomato to taste more “tomato-y.”

Though that test was a small one, it’s simple enough to be worth trying on your own for that possible tomato flavour boost. This trick can be a boon for your current influx of summer tomatoes: Instead of crowding your countertop with the fruit, keep a rotation of water-treated ones chilling in the fridge.