Walk into any grocery store and you’ll find a whole spectrum of tomatoes: cherry, Roma, grape, beefsteak, and more. While they might seem interchangeable, the differences become obvious once you start cooking with them.
Beefsteak tomatoes are ideal for sandwiches and burgers, where their large slices and juicy texture shine. Dense plum tomatoes, meanwhile, cook down into rich sauces without watering them out. Sweet cherry tomatoes are perfect for summer salads and sheet-pan dinners, while grape tomatoes are a little firmer, making them especially good for snacking and lunch boxes. Flavor varies wildly too. Some tomatoes skew tangy and savory; others are sweet, floral, and fruity.
Hybrid vs. heirloom tomatoes
Most of the tomatoes you’ll find in grocery stores year-round are hybrids, meaning they’ve been intentionally bred for specific characteristics—usually consistency, disease resistance, and prolonged shelf life. Not all hybrids are bad. There is an array of modern varieties developed with flavor in mind, too.
Supermarket tomatoes are frequently harvested before fully ripening while still hard as rocks with thick skins so that they can survive shipping and storage. Off the vine, tomatoes can’t continue developing the same balance of sugars, acids, and aromatic compounds that make peak season tomatoes taste so good. Instead, they’re often exposed to ethylene gas, which encourages ripening and reddening. The result can be tomatoes that look ripe but taste watery, mealy, or bland.
Heirloom varieties, on the other hand, are typically open-pollinated, meaning they’re pollinated naturally by insects, birds, wind, or human hands rather than through controlled hybrid breeding. These tomatoes generally “breed true,” meaning seeds saved from one generation will usually produce plants with the same characteristics as the parent plant.
Though definitions vary, heirloom tomatoes are generally varieties that have been cultivated and passed down for decades. They come in an astonishing range of colors, sizes, and shapes: perfectly round, deeply ribbed, heart-shaped, striped, green, yellow, purple, and nearly black. Their names are just as distinctive: Brandywine, Cherokee Purple, Black Krim, Green Zebra.
Heirloom tomatoes are often considered the more flavorful of the two. At the height of the summer season, they barely need anything beyond flaky salt and olive oil.
Common types of tomatoes
Here’s where tomatoes get confusing: “Heirloom” and “hybrid” describe how they were bred. Meanwhile, beefsteak, cherry, grape, and plum describe a tomato’s size, shape, or use. That’s why a tomato can be both a beefsteak and an heirloom, both a cherry tomato and a hybrid, or vice versa. Here are a few to look for when shopping:
Beefsteak tomatoes are notable for their size—they can weigh more than a pound each, with a diameter of six inches or more—and their texture. They have relatively small seed cavities compared to other tomatoes, giving them a higher ratio of flesh to juice and seeds.
Beefsteaks come in a huge range of varieties and colors. While you’ll most often see red tomatoes labeled simply as “beefsteak,” they can also be pink, yellow, green, white, or multicolored. Popular heirloom varieties like Brandywine, Cherokee Purple, and Black Krim are all considered beefsteaks.
Their hefty size and high flesh-to-seed ratio make them ideal for BLTs, burgers, tomato toast, and any situation where you want thick slices that won’t immediately collapse.
Also known as Roma or paste tomatoes, plum tomatoes are oval-shaped and smaller than beefsteaks. They have a lower water content than many other tomato varieties, with dense flesh that makes them particularly well-suited for cooking.
These are the tomatoes you’ll see all over Italy, with San Marzano being the most famous variety. They’re less about juicy tomato sandwiches and more about concentrated tomato flavor—the kind that clings to pasta, melts into braises, and turns into silky sauces.
Baby tomatoes include cherry, grape, and cocktail varieties. Cherry tomatoes are small, round, thin-skinned tomatoes that burst with juice when you bite into them. They’re usually very sweet, have a high water content, and come in a wide range of colors.
Grape tomatoes are more oblong, with thicker skins and less water than cherry tomatoes, which helps them last longer.
Cocktail tomatoes are larger than both grape and cherry tomatoes but still fall into the sweet, snackable category. Many commercial cocktail tomatoes are greenhouse-grown and available year-round, making them one of the more reliable fresh tomato options outside peak season.
More tomato varieties worth knowing
When it comes to sauce, San Marzano tomatoes are the gold standard. Originally grown in Italy, they’re a renowned variety of plum tomato prized for their dense flesh, relatively low seed count, balanced acidity, and rich flavor. Canned San Marzanos are a popular choice for making pomodoro and pizza sauce.
Campari tomatoes are a small hybrid variety known for their sweetness, juiciness, and relatively low acidity. Typically sold on the vine, they’re excellent in salads, sandwiches, pasta dishes, and anywhere you’d want a reliable fresh tomato.
Green tomatoes can be either unripe red tomatoes or varieties that remain green even when fully ripe. Unripe green tomatoes are firm, tart, and ideal for frying or pickling, while ripe green heirlooms tend to be softer, sweeter, and more complex. Use the fully ripe heirlooms anywhere you’d use any other type of tomato.
Yellow and orange tomatoes often taste sweeter and less acidic than red varieties, with a mellow, fruity flavor. They’re especially good in fresh salads, where their color can stand out amongst darker varieties and leafy greens.
How to choose the right tomato
The right tomato for your purposes depends on what you’re making. For salads and raw preparations, cherry tomatoes, Campari tomatoes, and peak-season heirloom varieties tend to deliver the most flavor and sweetness. For sauces and long-simmered cooking projects, plum tomatoes like Roma and San Marzano are ideal because their dense flesh cooks down without becoming watery.
Sandwiches, burgers, and tomato toast call for large slicers like beefsteaks. Grape and other small tomato varieties, meanwhile, are perfect for snacking, lunchboxes, sheet-pan dinners, and quick salads.
And don’t forget: when tomato season rolls around, buy the weird-looking heirloom—it’ll probably taste the best.
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This article is adapted from the book ‘What’s the Difference?’ by Brette Warshaw, with further reporting by Phoebe Fry.
