Popular for canning and sauce, Roma tomatoes can be great to grow at home! Here are some of the best Roma Tomato Varieties!
Roma tomatoes or Italian plum tomatoes, as they’re popularly famous for, are tangy and full of taste. They are dense, meaty, and have low moisture content with few seeds, making them perfect for pastes and sauces. With so many ways to use their delicious flavor, growing different Roma Tomato Varieties at home makes a lot of sense!
What is Roma Tomato?
Roma is a plum tomato, popular for both making tomato paste and canning, due to its slender and firm quality. It has an oblong shape and is more substantial in size. This variety is determinate, which implies the fruit ripens at one time, instead continuously through the season. You can enjoy it raw, but it tastes best when cooked.
Check out our article on growing Roma tomatoes here
Best Roma Tomato Varieties
1. Heinz
It is the most popular paste tomato variety. The tomatoes are large, flavorful and are rich in lycopene. Grow it in organically rich, well-draining soil and follow a moderate watering schedule.
2. Martino’s Roma
This semi-determinate heirloom tomato variety produces a profusion of richly flavored red pear tomatoes. They taste sweet when fresh and taste a lot better when cooked. These tomatoes have a meaty texture with few seeds and a sweet, acidic taste.
3. Plum Regal
Plum regal is a determinate, hybrid variety with thick skin and texture. It has meaty flesh and dark red skin with ‘musky’ and ‘earthy’ notes. This flavorful tomato is disease-resistant and has high yields with good flavor.
4. Sunrise Sauce
This hybrid, high-quality, determinate Roma tomato variety has easy-to-peel blemish-free, bright orange skin, and meaty texture, which is perfect for making sauces or salsa. It tastes great when cooked, but also has excellent flavor while eating fresh.
5. Granadero
It has bright red skin and an oval shape. This variety is pest-resistant and has terrific growth in open grounds when grown in fertile soil in cool temperatures.
6. San Marzano
San Maranzo is an heirloom Italian Roma-type tomato. It produces a cluster of large thinner fruits compared to the other Roma varieties. This type has thin skin and contains few seeds with solid flesh. San Maranzo is perfect for making sauces.
Here are some of the best tips for growing tomatoes in pots
7. 10 Fingers of Naples
It may be small in size but tastes really taste delicious and is better suited for salads. It is pointed, elongated, and grows up to 5-6 inches in length.
8. Martino’s Roma
This Italian heirloom is excellent for sauces, pastes, salsas, farmer’s markets. The Martino Roma’s richly flavored and perfectly suited for eating fresh though most often they are used for cooking.
9. Better Boy
The Better Boy variety of Roma tomato has existed for over 50 years and is a Guinness record holder for the amount of fruit that it can produce from a single plant. It is well recognized for its superior flavor.
Roma Tomato Uses
The paste variety of tomatoes are one of the most nutritious and delicious. No matter how they are served, whether you choose to slice it, dice it, or even enjoy biting into it raw, the rounded pulpy berries are suitable for any kind of meals and snacks!
- It has almost no seed and juice which makes it a good choice for canning.
- The dense meaty texture is good for making stews and sauces.
Very impressive of Martino’s Roma to score both 2nd AND 8th place on your list. Also, Better Boy is not Roma. Come on people….
OMG! These varieties of tomatoes look super juicy. I liked the Plum Regal one;)
Went to the farmers market and asked what variety of Roma tomatoes they grew. None of them knew. Had to check back home. I would like to try the Heinz, because on the lycopene benefits.