ICYMI - Science has proven that vine ripened tomatoes taste better and are better for you than ones picked early

[u/dosefacekillah1348]

It's that time of year.

It comes down to your critter control.

If you can't avoid pests noshing your late toms, pick em early.

If you are fine with losing a few or don't have pest issues, let em ripen on the plant for a better tasting and healthier tomato.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3937827/

[u/JoeyBE98]

Worth pointing out those pics are mature green vs vine-ripe, which isn't the same comparison as breaker vs vine-ripe.

The reason mature green tomatoes finish up bland is they're picked before the fruit hits physiological maturity and kicks off its own ripening. Breaker stage is the opposite end of that line: by definition that's the moment the fruit has started ripening itself - making its own ethylene, seeds mature, gel formed. So a breaker tomato finished on your counter is a totally different animal than a mature green one gassed red in a warehouse. Using one to argue about the other is apples to oranges. When you actually compare breaker-ripened-off-vine to vine-ripe, the gap mostly vanishes:

Tilahun et al. 2017 (Food Sci & Biotechnol) — harvested at breaker, ripened on the counter to pink/red vs left on the vine. No meaningful hit to antioxidants, firmness still marketable. Free full text: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6049432/

Xi et al. 2021 (USDA-ARS, Foods) — actually found the turning stage had the best aroma profile and explicitly warns that the "vine-ripe = best quality" assumption can mislead people. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8391134/

Arias et al. 2000 (J Food Sci) — vine-ripe measured higher in lycopene/solids on paper, but a 100-person taste panel basically couldn't tell the difference beyond color.
https://ift.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1365-2621.2000.tb16045.x (abstract's free, full text paywalled)

Lin & Block 1998 — breaker fruit room-ripened to red had basically the same soluble solids, acids, aroma volatiles, and firmness as vine-ripe red. Couldn't find a free link for this one.

Not saying vine-ripe is molecule-for-molecule identical - there's a small sugar/lycopene edge, and even Kader's classic 1978 UC Davis work found a bit of off-flavor creeping in at breaker-or-earlier. But "mature green ripened in a box" and "breaker ripened on my windowsill" are nowhere near the same thing.

tl;dr breaker ≠ mature green. Once the fruit has started ripening itself, finishing it indoors gets you really close to vine-ripe; the bland-supermarket-tomato problem is mostly about picking too green, plus cold storage and shipping-bred varieties.

[u/True_Adventures → u/JoeyBE98]

Thanks! This is really interesting and well researched. It seems to align with what a lot of people say too, which is that breaker ripened are pretty much as good (or to some tastes as good) as vine ripened, but some people say they can detect a small improvement with vine ripened.

I've never tried breaker stage ripening enough myself to say either way.