Tomatoes

Sweet, acidic and naturally savoury. Tomatoes are one of the few ingredients that can bring sweetness, freshness, acidity and umami to the same dish.

Tomatoes bring vitamin C, potassium and lycopene.

Lycopene is the clever one.

Fresh tomatoes contain it, but cooking tomatoes, including the process used to make canned tomatoes, makes it easier for your body to absorb. Add a little oil and absorption improves even further.

So tinned, roasted and slow simmered tomatoes aren't just convenient. They're nutritionally smart too.

A tomato should smell like a tomato. If it looks perfect but smells of nothing, chances are it'll taste of nothing.

Look for good colour, firm flesh and avoid badly bruised fruit unless you're using it immediately.

Store at room temperature out of direct sunlight.

Cold temperatures dull flavour. If refrigerated, bring back to room temperature before eating.

Salads, sauces, soups, roasting, curries, sandwiches, salsa and pasta dishes.

A supermarket tomato in February is not the same vegetable as one off a vine in August. It's been picked unripe so it can ship without bruising, gas-ripened with ethylene to turn red, and bred for shelf life over flavour. It looks like a tomato. It mostly isn't.

For most of the year, tinned tomatoes are better than fresh. Tinned San Marzano DOP (from a specific region of Italy) are the benchmark — sweet, low-acid, picked properly ripe. Generic "Italian peeled tomatoes" vary wildly.

Read the tin: just tomatoes (or tomatoes + tomato juice + a basil leaf) is the right answer. Tomatoes + citric acid + calcium chloride + salt is fine but lesser. Watery tins with hard cores at the stem end are the bottom shelf.

Never refrigerate ripe tomatoes. Cold destroys the flavour compounds and turns the texture mealy. Bench, out of the sun, stem-end down.

The darker red the better, but ignore the leaves. Vine-attached doesn't mean better — it's a marketing trick.