Taste: Tomato may be Ugly, but it tastes great

Make way for the Ugly tomato. The Nibbler thinks it is the best thing out of the Florida tomato patch since the little grape tomato (and far better than those cute imports with their very own vines).

The Ugly is not good looking; it's a big pinkish tomato with heavy lobes and looks like some in your grandparents' backyard, but it's got real taste, higher in sugar and higher in acid, like that backyard tomato did, not like most hothouse tomatoes.

Indeed,the Ugly stems from an heirloom variety that was the backyard tomato of Garagiulo, a Naples tomato packer that's one of the biggest in the country. "It's the one we grew for ourselves and gave to our friends," says Ron Pearson, but grocers said it wasn't hard enough or pretty enough to sell.

"We kind of let them talk us into not bringing it to market," he said, but after awhile Garagiulo heard consumers demanding tomatoes with taste, so the company bred its favorite tomato to a point that it could be picked carefully and wrapped, named it Ugly (and patented the improved variety) and called the bluff of shoppers.

Consumers appear to love it even at a premium price for the extra labor. Garagiulo started with a small supply, only enough to supply west coast Publix stores so far (and soon Atlanta). It plans to grow Uglies year round, shifting from fields in Naples and Immokalee to Quincy and then New Jersey.

Try 'em now. The Naples spring crop is the best of the year, Pearson says, and the weather this season has made it a "sensational" Ugly vintage.

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