Strange Fruit Is Strange Color . . . Trust Us

What strange new fruit is this? Yellow tomatoes, that’s what.

You’ll have to take our word for it, since this is a black and white picture. But you might notice that the tomatoes are lighter than usual, and small for cherry tomatoes, and more teardrop-shaped than round. They taste good too.

Those who shop at better grocery stores know that produce sections have become much more colorful lately. Green peppers now come in yellow, red, orange, white and purple. And tomatoes may be following in their wake.

“They’re very sweet, and almost infinitesimal as far as seeds are concerned,” says Dennis Krondack, director of produce operations for the Irvine Ranch Farmers Market. He was talking about the little teardrop tomatoes pictured, but Irvine Ranch also sells regular round yellow tomatoes, both cherry and full-size.

Krondack was visiting the Woodland Hills store the other day, which was temporarily out of yellow tomatoes. They don’t always get them in, and sometimes restaurants come and buy up a whole flat. Because they’re a novelty item filled in small quantities, yellow tomatoes also cost two or three times as much as red ones.

But why not plan to grow your own next spring? Perry’s, a wholesale nursery based in Ventura, plans to sell more unusual vegetables and fruits in 1988. Among full-size yellow tomatoes, two kinds to look for are Golden Jubilee, touted as the low-acid tomato, and Lemon Boy, which is sweeter and less bland.

You could be the first on your block to serve yellow-tomato salad, yellow-tomato spaghetti sauce or yellow-tomato salsa, all perfectly tasty dishes with a lot of eye appeal.

“People are real skeptical about buying something new,” says Perry’s sales manager Dick Gardena, “even though they’ll ask about it.”

It seems they are curious . . . but yellow.