When Should You Remove Tomato Seeds in Recipes?
When recipes call for seeding a tomato, what they really mean is removing the seeds along with the jelly and juice that surround them. Many cooks remove this "pulp" to prevent a finished dish, especially one that is not cooked such as salad or pico de gallo, from being too wet. Others remove seeds because they say the seeds are bitter or ruin the texture or look of the dish.
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Removing Seeds
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The problem with removing the seeds is that doing so upsets the flavor balance within the tomato. The flavor of a tomato comes from its blend of sugars and acids. The sugars (only 3% of the tomato is sugar) are found in the fleshy wall, the acids (primarily citric, malic and glutamic) in the jelly and juice that surround the seeds. If you remove the seeds and jelly, you change the flavor profile of the tomato and may need to compensate for flavor loss by adding a little acid, such as lemon or lime juice, to the finished dish.
It's seldom necessary to remove tomato seeds if you are planning to cook the tomatoes, although for cosmetic reasons you may wish to. If this is the case, you can preserve the acid flavor by simmering the skin, jelly and juice separately from the flesh. Cooking a tomato does not destroy the acids; therefore, you can cook the jelly and seeds, along with the skin, until the liquids are reduced by half, and then strain what's left into the cooking flesh. In this way you reduce the amount of liquid but do not lose any flavor.
Seed Content Relative to Variety
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While the size and color of the tomato do not necessarily indicate how much pulp it will have, the variety of tomato will. Plum tomatoes, also known as Roma, and sometimes called paste tomatoes because they are used to make tomato paste, have thick flesh and less jelly than other varieties. They also generally contain less juice.
Beefsteak tomatoes have a small pulp cavity relative to their thick fleshy walls; therefore they contain fewer seeds.
Salad tomatoes tend to contain a lot of jelly, curiously enough, since most cooks dislike all that extra juiciness in their salads.
Cherry and grape tomatoes, though they have a lot of juice relative to their size, nonetheless have a low jelly-to-flesh ratio.
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