Tomato, 'Cuor di Bue Albenga'

(Lycopersicon esculentum) We’ve looked at many new-to-us varieties of tomatoes over the years, and few have left us as excited as this Cuor di Bue (“ox heart”) type tomato from Ligurian coast town of Albenga, just west of Genoa, in Northern Italy. When most people think of saucing or roasting tomatoes they think of the long slender Romas or San Marzanos from the bright sun and scorching heat of southern Italy. In the north, however, they tend to take a different shape: big, 10-16 oz pleated teardrops with meaty centers and narrow seed cavities around the margins. In our experience, these northern tomatoes are often better adapted to the PNW and develop superior flavor in our cool maritime growing season. Albenga was the tomato that we kept coming back to all season at the farm when it was time for a stew of white beans, kale, and roasted tomatoes, pasta e fagioli, or a just simple rustic pasta sauce. It featured heavily in many of our most memorable meals of the harvest. They are excellent sliced and eaten raw, but the variety really shines with roasting, as it brings out the savory richness of flavor. In the field, the vines are stout and vigorous with a great uniform growing habit for two leader pruning. It showed better crack and blossom end rot resistance than the other oxhearts we've grown, with a good fruit set and a fairly concentrated mid-late season harvest period. Indeterminate.
85 days. UO

Packet: 30-35 seeds