Whether you pronounce it tomayto or tomahto, nothing says summer better than fresh, delicious tomatoes, especially when they’re in a delicious marinara soup!
While any tomato will work in this marinara soup recipe, we encourage you to try it with different cultivars. There are so many kinds of tomatoes—the USDA says there are 25,000 varieties—you could make this dish just about every day for, well, a really long time.
The red tomato varieties seem to be the most popular, including Beefsteak, Roma, and Abraham Lincoln. Pink tomatoes taste somewhat similar to the red ones; pink types include Julia Child, Pink Girl, and Brandywine. Orange tomato varieties include Hillbilly, Persimmon, and Mountain Gold. Orange tomatoes are often sweeter than red tomatoes, due to their higher sugar content. Yellow varieties are similar to orange—again, usually less tangy than red tomatoes. Look for yellow tomatoes to have names like Azoychka, Golden Boy, and Garden Peach. But it doesn’t stop there! Green tomato varieties are green when they’re ripe, and usually have lower acidic values than their red cousins. Black tomatoes are not really black; So-called black tomatoes come in a range of dark colors (deep purple or brown, bluish-brown, mahogany). There are bi-colored or striped tomatoes, which come in an amazing array of colors: red with yellow stripes, red with orange or green stripes, black with orange stripes, green tomatoes with yellow stripes, and many more color combinations.
