Black Cherry tomato is a small type of cherry tomato that ripens with a black-purple skin and dark red flesh. The tomato has a sweet-tart taste and is often referred to as the miniature version of the equally popular but bigger Cherokee purple tomato. The Black cherry tomato is an indeterminate tomato that was developed in the United States. It has a prolific plant, a vigorous grower which can withstand common elements such as wind and heat and produces a lot of fruit. Black cherry tomatoes are suitable for use in salads, mixed vegetable roasts, sauces, salsas, garnishing and also as off-the-vine snacks.
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Handy Tomato Kitchen Utensils
It is often asked what to do with tomatoes after harvest. Here is a list of handy kitchen utensils that expand possibilities when working with tomatoes.
- Tomato strainer
- Tomato/Salsa Blender
- Food Processor for Tomatoes
- Tomato press
- Tomato mandoline for slicing
- Tomato slicer holder
- Heavy duty tomato slicer
- Tomato dicer
- Tomato corer
- Tomato jars for canning
- Tomato knife
- Tomato saver
- Countertop storage basket
- Tomato growing pots
What are Black Cherry Tomatoes?
Black cherry tomatoes are very small sweet to tangy tasting tomato plant fruits which are a bonafide member of the species Solanum lycopersicum. Sometimes literature places Black cherry tomatoes in the genus lycopersicon esculentum. This is due to a now resolved historical naming contest whose details are addressed here. However, regardless of genus placement, Black cherry is of the family Solanaceae whose other family members are peppers, eggplants and potatoes.
Although named Black, the Black cherry tomato is sometimes described as ripening with a dark-purple pinkish color, depending on the source consulted. Other sources also have a different take with the University of Florida Gardening Solutions describing it as a “deep, dark red tomato”. Even more interesting, some seed suppliers such as HRSeeds.com, with a track record of tomato reviews, detail it as “almost dark brown in color but more of a mahogany deep red”.
These variations in color description seem to find an explanation in a phenomenon associated with many colored tomato cultivars. According to Jim Meyers a renowned plant breeder with Oregon State University, purple colored tomatoes contain antioxidants which depend on exposure to sunlight to fully produce. If the tomato does not receive adequate sunlight, the purple color does not fully express itself. This seems to explain the seemingly ever varying color descriptions as observed by different growers. This boils down to growing conditions.
Nonetheless, a point of convergence is that the Black cherry tomato is a very small well rounded tomato in shape. When mature and ripe it weighs between 0.5 Oz. and 0.7 Oz. or 15 grams and 20 grams. Furthermore, when cut open, the Black cherry shows dark red flesh inside and is juicy.
The tomato’s seeds are surrounded by orangey looking gel. The Black cherry is a much sweeter tomato to the taste than regular cherry tomatoes. Although often pointed to as a miniature version of the Cherokee purple tomato, it is however not as meaty as the Cherokee itself.
Black Cherry Origins
Black cherry tomatoes are an open pollinated cherry cultivar that was released in 2003. The tomato was developed by Vince Sapp of Tomato Growers Supply (TGS), one of America’s biggest seed suppliers. The exact parentage of the Black cherry has not been made public.
However, some sources link Black cherry tomato origins with regions around Russia where numerous black tomato types have their roots. Furthermore, it is thought that there has been extensive hybridization involving black tomatoes in the last 200 years raising the possibility that the undisclosed parentage used in developing Sapp’s black cherry may have links with these early varieties.
Since Sapp’s 2003 black cherry release, there has been another popular dark purple cherry tomato released in 2011 by Oregon State University. The Indigo Rose is a cherry tomato which when fully exposed to sunlight ripens with a deep purple or black looking color.
Unlike the Black cherry which seems to fully change color in a wholesome manner, albeit with varying shades between growers, the Indigo Rose cherry tomato is sensitive to light exposure such that a single fruit can have different intensities of pigmentation and usually has a purple crown when ripe.
Black Cherry Characteristics
The following is a summary of Vince Sapp’s Black cherry tomato characteristics.
| Botanical name – Solanum lycopersicum |
| Family – Nightshade family |
| Type – Open-pollinated cherry tomato |
| Breed – Heirloom |
| Origins – 2003, Vince Sapp, U.S.A |
| Shape – Round shape |
| Size – Small, approx. 1.5 inches or 3.8cm |
| Skin – Dark-purple, dark-red, dusky purple-brown, blackish-purple |
| Flesh – Dark red |
| Flavor – Sweet, tangy |
| Applications – salads, salsa, snacking, roasting |
| Plant type – Indeterminate |
| Yield – Vigorous, Very productive |
| Days to Maturity (DTM) – 64 to 80 days |
| Plant Height – 6 to 8 ft. or 1.82m to 2.44m |
| Fruit Size – 0.5 Oz. to 0.7 Oz. or 15 grams to 20 grams |
| Disease Resistance – Fusarium Wilt (F) Race 1, Gray Leaf Spot (GLS), Leaf Mold (LM) |
Black Cherry Tomato Nutrition and Benefits
Black cherry tomatoes are nutritious tomatoes which also offer functional health benefits beyond just nutrition according to some scientific studies. As far as nutrition is concerned, the most apparent nutritional benefits associated with tomatoes, in general terms, are vitamins B and E and potassium, according to WebMD.
Black cherries contain lycopene, an antioxidant found in abundance in ripened tomatoes. According to the journal Plants, lycopene was found to be higher in the Black cherry tomato compared to red tomato varieties. This is an astounding finding given that ripened red tomatoes are generally considered to have the most lycopene concentration. Lycopene is what also gives the tomatoes their red color.
Lycopene is thought to carry potential to reduce risk of prostate cancer. It also plays a key role in preventing cardiovascular disease over and above reducing the risk of death from Alzheimer’s disease in adults according to Plants.
Additionally, a study published in the journal Neurochemical Research highlighted potential benefits of lycopene in the treatment of Parkinson’s disease and other neurological problems via protection against oxidative stress.
Apart from the nutrition and health benefits associated with Black cherry’s lycopene content, there are also some strong positive health benefits to be derived from anthocyanins. Anthocyanins are a phytochemical water soluble compound found in the skin and outer tissue of the Black cherry tomato.
Beyond Black cherries, anthocyanins are also found in eggplants, purple lettuce, purple broccoli, some grapes and berries, for example. They are responsible for the purple and black color found in certain fruit and vegetables including Black cherry tomatoes. Many fruits and vegetables are considered functional foods based on the presence of this pigmentation compound. Functional foods refers to foods that go beyond nutrition but offer superior health benefits beyond just nutrition.
The functional food status of Black cherry tomatoes emanates from scientifically proven association between anthocyanins and a variety of human health benefits such as enhanced vision, inhibition of tumor formation, cardiovascular disease protection, support against obesity, diabetes prevention, memory enhancement and inflammation reduction among others.
Nonetheless, not all purple or dark colored tomatoes carry these stated health benefits. The normal transition of tomatoes from green to red when they ripen is due to a biological mechanism involving plant genes. This mechanism degrades the chlorophyll that fills a green tomato making way for lycopene which turns the tomato color to red. Red when ripe tomatoes successfully go through this change.
The journal Plants Physiology identifies what are called stay-green traits. These genetic traits prevent chlorophyll degradation in some tomato varieties leading to lycopene accumulation in the presence of the chlorophyll. This mixture produces a dark red or deep purple to brownish fruit as can be seen in varieties such as the Green Zebra tomato. The dark pigmentation in such tomatoes is thus not related to health beneficial anthocyanins but just a genetic issue.
Summary of Black Cherry Tomato Nutrition and Benefits
In summary, Black cherry tomatoes have an association with the following nutritional benefits in humans.
| 1. Vitamins B and E and Potassium |
| 2. Improved vision |
| 3. Prevention of tumor formation |
| 4. Protection against cardiovascular diseases |
| 5. Reduced risk of obesity |
| 6. Prevention of diabetes |
| 7. Enhancement of memory |
| 8. Strong anti-inflammation |
| 9. Blood pressure control |
| 10. Liver injury protection |
Black Cherry Tomato Recipes
Black cherries have a variety of recipe applications. For all intents and purposes, they are suitable for use anywhere where cherry tomatoes appear in recipes unless otherwise specified. Black cherry tomatoes taste sweet with a light tart and smokiness. They are also low in acid. The following are some scrumptious recipes to try that call for Black cherry tomatoes.
Oven Roasted Black Cherries Tomato Paste Recipe
This recipe produces a rich and scrumptious looking tomato paste made using Black cherry tomatoes. You can use the paste immediately in stews and soups or freeze for later use. This recipe takes only three ingredients, cherry tomatoes, olive oil and some seasoning.
The ingredients are roasted, blended, strained then cooked in a sauce pan before the sauce is ready. This recipe provides a practical way of preserving your tomato harvest especially when approaching winter. The recipe takes 1 hour 40 minutes to complete. View Recipe.
Fire-Roasted Cherry Tomato Salsa Recipe
There are many ways to make salsa. This recipe will produce a smokey flavored salsa which is unlike most approaches to making sauces. Although the recipe calls for any cherry tomatoes, this is an opportunity to use Black cherries.
Apart from Black cherry tomatoes, the recipe will also use jalapeno peppers, olive oil, yellow onion, garlic and ground cumin among other ingredients. The jalapeno peppers can also be replaced with pimento peppers if you so wished. Serve this with snacks such as chips or make Mexican Chilaquiles rojos with a twist. This recipe yields 2 cups and takes 2 hours 25 minutes to make. View Recipe.
Cherry Tomato Confit Recipe
Confit is a French word that refers to preservation. Confit dishes are typically slow-cooked over an extended period of time. In this recipe this method of cooking is applied on cherry tomatoes. The final product will be stored in airtight jars and refrigerated lasting some 2 weeks.
The recipe calls for any cherry tomatoes which leaves a lot of room to use Black cherry tomatoes. You can use the Black cherry tomato confit that this recipe produces in pasta sauces, salads, as pizza topping, as a side dish with other vegetables such as lettuce. There are so many applications for this confit, the effort and time spent making it is very rewarding. View Recipe.
Spicy Cherry Tomato and Cucumber Salad with Basil
This is a delicious yet very simple to make salad which combines cherry tomatoes, cucumbers and basil. No heat is involved in the making of this salad. It is an easy to make garden salad which calls for a mix of cherry tomatoes for color. This means you can use Black cherry tomatoes, pink, yellow and red as you find them.
English cucumber will be required for this recipe. This type of cucumber is bitterless with an easily digestible skin. You won’t need to peel the cucumber. Substitutions would be Persian, Armenian and lemon cucumbers. Freshly ground black pepper will also be used in this recipe as seasoning. View Recipe.
Roasted Broccoli with Cherry Tomatoes Recipe
With some 23 minutes to spare and requisite ingredients at hand, you will end up with a scrumptious dish of roasted broccoli with Black cherry tomatoes. This is another recipe that calls for any cherry tomato type. You have the liberty here to use Black cherries by themselves or as a mix with other cherry tomatoes.
Other ingredients that go into this recipe apart from the broccoli and cherry tomatoes include shallots, pepper flakes, garlic, olive oil and parmesan cheese among others. This is an easy recipe which yields 4. View Recipe.
Mediterranean Salad with Cherry Tomatoes Recipe
This is a Mediterranean recipe that calls for a variety of cherry tomatoes. Instead of using just yellow and red cherries in this recipe, you could also add Black cherry tomatoes into the mix. This is a fresh garden salad with no heat or cooking involved. The recipe is in two parts, the salad and the dressing.
We don’t see this too often but this recipe also uses Frisée lettuce alongside the tomatoes. However, if you did not fancy endive due to its bitter traits, you could also replace the frisee with some green or purple lettuce. Other ingredients in this recipe include olive oil, black olives, fresh mozzarella and red onion. View Recipe.
Black Cherry Tomato Seeds
Black cherry seeds can be obtained through two means, saving seed or from commercial seed suppliers.
Saving Black Cherry Seed
One of the most used methods of obtaining tomato seed is through saving seed from the previous harvest. Saving seed is a process of collecting seed from plants in the current season for use in the following season which is often the following year.
Almost all tomato varieties are suitable to save seed. However, the golden rule is to save seed only from open-pollinated plants. This ensures that true to type crops will come out of the saved seed. Black cherry tomatoes are suitable to save seed as long as they are fruits of an open-pollinated parent. The following are the few simple steps to take to save seed from the Black cherry tomato.
| 1. Get a handful of ripe Black cherry tomatoes. |
| 2. Take a skewer and poke a hole on the top or bottom of the fruit. The hole will be used to squeeze the seed out of the fruit without splattering the tomato. |
| 3. Squeeze the seeds out and collect them into a container. |
| 4. Fill the container with all the squeezed out seeds. This step helps separate the seeds from some tomato palps through dilution. |
| 5. Strain the seeds with a strainer or sieve into another container. |
| 6. Fill the new container with the strained seeds with water and leave to sit. Leaving the seeds to sit in water for about a week triggers fermentation which is important in removing the gel around the seeds. |
| 7. After a week, rinse the Black cherry tomato seeds out from the fermented water. You will notice clean gel-free seeds. The water will have a foul odor. |
| 8. Perform the final strain of the seeds from the rinsing water and spread them out on paper. Gloss or waxy paper is recommended vs newspaper to avoid sticking. |
| 9. Leave the seeds to dry well spread out evenly on top of gloss paper for 24 to 48 hours. |
| 10. Once the Black cherry tomato seeds have dried, gather them into an envelope, label and store in a cool dark place for next season. |
Commercial Black Cherry Tomato Seeds
Purchasing commercially available seeds is by far the easiest and most convenient way of obtaining Black cherry tomato seeds. Thankfully, Black cherry seeds are widely available in North America from a variety of high quality sources. The following are some sources of Black cherry seeds in the United States.
- Black Cherry Seeds via Amazon
- Baker Creek Black Cherry Tomato seeds
- Seed Savers Exchange Black Cherry Seeds
- West Coast Seeds Black Cherry Seeds
- Johnny’s Seeds Black Cherry Organic Tomato Seeds
- Burpee Black Cherry Seeds
- Victory Seeds Black Cherry Tomato
Growing Black Cherry Tomatoes
Black cherry tomatoes are easy to grow. They require growing conditions that are much similar to cherry tomatoes and other regular tomatoes in general. They are also prone to almost similar diseases and pests as regular tomatoes. Tomatoes are warm weather vegetables (botanically fruit) which will thrive if afforded at least three straight months of warm weather with full sun exposure.
Plant Black cherry tomatoes in well-draining soil with slightly acidic pH of between 6.2 and 6.8. As much as Black cherry tomatoes offer some crack-resistance, the tomato plant soil should be kept moist and avoid moisture stress which causes tomatoes to crack when eventually watered.
Due to its nectar or pollen rich flowers, Black cherry tomato attracts bees. This is also beneficial to its own pollination efficiency. There is more to appreciate about growing tomatoes in general. For this, we recommend this resource by the University of New Hampshire.
Growing Black Cherry Tomatoes in Containers
In the tomato world, determinate tomato plants are generally more suitable for growing in containers compared to indeterminate tomato plants. This is because they have a manageable height which is also predictable. Although an indeterminate plant, Black cherry tomato can be grown in containers and patios according to Gardeners’ World.
The grower must however be aware that indeterminate plants tend to have an extensive root system which requires a good enough container. The plant itself is a prolific grower which also calls for sturdy support. The following are necessary steps when growing Black cherry tomatoes in containers.
Size of the Container
An 18 inch or 45cm diameter container with a depth of at least 12 inches or 30cm will be required to plant your Black cherry tomato. The container should also have drainage holes. The diameter of the growing pot needs to be 18 inches and the container must accommodate only one plant.
It must be noted that two tomato plants planted side by side in the same 18 inch container will be less productive than one tomato plant planted in the middle of the 18 inch diameter container. In summary, the rule is one tomato plant per 18 inch container. This here is an example of a container size and type suitable for planting your Black cherry plant.
Soil for the Container
The next consideration after container size is the growing medium. There is general disquiet in the tomato gardening world concerning which is the best soil to use when planting tomatoes in containers. Opinions often differ. Despite the proliferation of a variety of commercially packaged potting soils, the fact of the matter is that crummy backyard soil is good enough to successfully grow Black cherry tomatoes in containers.
The backyard soil is mixed with mature compost and peat moss. In this respect, the actual recommended soil recipe for tomato container growing is 60% crummy backyard soil, 20% compost and 20% peat moss. This is the recipe illustrated in the graph above. In the absence of crummy soil, commercially available top soil can be used in its place while dehydrated cow manure can be used in place of the compost.
Treating the Soil
Once the above mentioned recipe has been prepared and the container filled with the soil out of the recipe, the soil must be treated. The growing medium must be treated with powder copper fungicide to protect your tomato plant against fungal blight disease. To do this, the surface of the soil in the container is dusted with the fungicide before planting the tomato tree.
Planting Black Cherry Tomato in Container
The next step after treating the soil with the fungicide is to dig a deep hole in the middle of the container. Planted in the hole will be the Black cherry tomato transplant. The transplant itself is first pruned of any lower leaves right up to the top, leaving only three or four leaves attached. It is then buried deep in the hole with only a short part of the stem with leaves attached remaining above the soil. The plant is then watered after the following final step.
Care and Maintenance
To prevent blossom end rot which is common in tomatoes grown in containers, some calcium is added to the soil soon after planting the Black cherry tomato tree in the container. Although there are other sources of calcium, the easiest and often recommended is organic bone meal (example). This is applied around the plant at a dose of 1/4 a cup. Due to the inevitable leaching of nutrients that occurs when plants are grown in containers, the bone meal must be applied every two weeks.
Furthermore, some growers use the weeks in between the application of bone meal to also apply tomato-tone (example). This is a commercial product, a natural organic fertilizer, that encourages flowers for best fruit production. It also promotes healthy plant growth. Tomato plants treated with this product produce high quality tomato fruit.
Followed well, these simple steps will produce magnificent Black cherry tomatoes in containers just as those raised in the ground.
When to Pick Black Cherry Tomatoes
One of the most frequently asked questions is when to pick Black cherry tomatoes. Black cherry tomatoes do not turn red when ripe. The grower must necessarily look for other cues to determine if the fruit is ready for harvest. One basic but relevant way of telling if the tomatoes are ready to pick are the days to maturity. This is usually indicated on the seed package. Days to maturity of Black cherry tomatoes usually fall between 64 and 80 days depending on the seed supplier.
Black cherry tomatoes start off green before turning color to deep purple when ripe. When ripening they get a color blush which goes towards reddish-pinkish starting at the blossom end. This color change spreads to the top of the tomato. However, the shoulders of the fruit remain with some green pigmentation even when ripe.
While the squeeze test can be applied to this tomato variety, it must be noted that Black cherries do not provide the common cue of a give when ripe. Instead, they are firm to the squeeze even when fully ripe. The outer flesh of the tomato is quite unyielding which also explains their resistance to cracking.
Furthermore, when Black cherry tomatoes are ripe, they easily detach from the vine with not much effort. If you find yourself fighting finger and nail to get the fruit off the vine, it’s probably not ready to pick.
There is more to appreciate about when to harvest tomatoes including the debate between growers on this issue. We recommend this article with full details on when to pick tomatoes of different cultivars and varieties.
Conclusion
Black Cherry tomato is a type of cherry tomato which has a round shape and is very small in size. The tomato has a sweet taste with a hint of tanginess. When ripe the tomato does not turn color to red but becomes deep purple. Black cherry is applicable in a wide variety of recipes and can be used in place of any cherry type tomato when cooking. Its purple color is an indication of the presence of health benefits derived from antioxidants. The tomato is easy to grow and can also be raised in containers.
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