What's in Season: Field tomatoes at Amato Farm

By AMY SOWDER

Dripping down your chin with juicy sweetness, a tomato from your local farm is an ethereal eating experience in August that exists galaxies apart from the flavorless supermarket consolation prize.

Once you’ve tasted a good local, sun-kissed tomato, you can’t go back. Why bother sinking your teeth into the watery, mealy imitation shipped from afar?

And tomato time is now. 

Come fall, that lackluster, far-flung tomato will be more expensive with the White House’s recently imposed 17% tariffs on Mexican imports — where a lot of our supermarket produce is grown.

The lack of cost savings makes it even more reasonable to take a jaunt to our many farm stands and markets while you can, such as the unassuming Amato Farm. At the border of Katonah and Somers, the multigenerational family farm is six minutes north of Muscoot Farm on Route 100.

Past the upcycled farm-themed sculptures, basil plants, Tibetan prayer flags, and bottled flowers, you might find Christina Amato seated at the register near the scale. Her husband and the namesake farmer, Michael Amato, could wander in and out.

“Michael grew up here at this farm. His grandparents started it in the late 1940s,” she said. The couple have been operating the farm stand for about 11 years. It’s open daily from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. 

Michael’s father focused on eggs before running a butcher shop with his son. Then, the farm turned toward fresh fruit, vegetables, honey and flowers. Pick-your-own peaches should be available when ripe this month, and in the fall, pick-your-own apples. 

But on this humid, warm Sunday, three categories of tomatoes gleamed from their wicker baskets: red greenhouse, red field, and a rainbow of cherry tomatoes.

“Greenhouse tomatoes are better than store-bought tomatoes, but field tomatoes are the best,” Christina said. “They have the best flavor compared to what’s trucked in.”

Just as we waved goodbye to July, the tomatoes at Amato Farm were trickling in, and they’ll likely be ripe and ready for purchasing early August through September — barring a damaging weather event, of course.

“I eat cherry tomatoes like grapes,” Christina said. After all, tomatoes are botanically considered a fruit, even if we treat it like a vegetable in our cooking. Her favorite way to eat the larger field tomatoes is sliced and nestled with crispy bacon and lettuce, slathered with mayonnaise between slices of white bread. There’s nothing like a classic BLT sandwich to showcase these sun-kissed slicer tomatoes.

“We have five or six different varieties in case one doesn’t do well in the weather. They’re varieties designed for the field,” Michael said. 

Mountain Fresh is one variety he picked for the early part of the season. It’s possibly the most widely-grown market tomato in the East and Midwest, according to Johnny’s Selected Seeds, an employee-owned seed producer and merchant.

Able to tolerate cool and wet conditions, the Mountain Fresh seed produces 8- to 16-ounce slicers with good flavor. Randolph Gardner developed this variety at North Carolina State University.

Amato Farm grows a jewelry box of cherry tomato varieties too. 

Tangerine-colored Sun Golds are the most popular, Christina said. With their intensely fruity flavor, these orange-hued cherry tomatoes start yielding early and bear right through the season. They have a tendency to split during shipping, so Sun Golds are an exclusively fresh-market treat. 

Another striking variety “that we call Chocolate Cherry,” Christina said, is the sweet and robust Black Cherry tomato, considered one of the best-tasting. Bred in Florida by the late Vince Sapp, the USDA-certified organic round fruits are an almost ombre, red-brown-green-purply color.

The farm stand also had the pink-hued, crack-resistant Sun Peach, plus the adorable Apple Yellow tomato with a dimpled-bell shape like an apple. Disease and crack-resistant, this variety has a balanced flavor — a rare find in a yellow tomato. The Apple Yellow is an All-American Selections winner, which are reliable, non-GMO varieties with proven superior garden performance in AAS trial grounds across North America. Each year, a few select winners are chosen by an expert panel of independent judges based on criteria such as flavor, color, length of harvest, earliness to bloom or harvest, disease resistance, yield, and overall performance.

The list of varieties you might encounter at Amato Farm can go on. Yet they all travel just a short stroll from the field to your hands, maximizing freshness, their vitamin C, potassium, folate, vitamin K  — and most importantly, flavor.

“We have them planted in different layers so that some start now, some later, and then some even later,” Michael said. “This way, there’s always something to eat.”

Amato Farm and farm stand is located at 121 Route 100, Katonah.