Tomato Health Facts: Acid Reduction, Nutrition & Prep

Tomatoes offer significant health benefits, but their oxalic acid can affect some individuals. Learn to make tomato sauce less acidic, the glycemic index of fresh fruit, and find out if it is safe to cook tomato dishes in metal pans.

Tomato juice

Benefits of Tomato Juice

Tomato juice has long been a staple in Western and international cuisine. This colorful drink is nutrient-rich and low in calories and fat. In fact, tomato juice provides several key nutrients that your body requires to function properly. Tomato juice offers good sources of various vitamins and antioxidants.

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Cherry tomatoes

Cherry Tomatoes Nutrition Information

Cherry tomatoes are small tomatoes that range from the size of a dime to the size of a half-dollar piece. They come in a variety of shapes, sizes and colors, including red, yellow, orange, white, pink and black.

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Sun Dried Tomatoes on Wooden Table

How to Store and Freeze Sun-Dried Tomatoes

A single sun-dried tomato can change the entire flavor of a meal. A tomato that is dehydrated in the sun develops an intense flavor and chewy texture without losing the nutrients, including vitamins A and C and the antioxidant lycopene, that make tomatoes a valuable part of your diet.

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Tomatoes

How to Substitute Fresh Tomatoes for Canned Diced Tomatoes

There is a school of thought that considers canned foods to be a compromise, trading quality for convenience. That's not always true. With tomatoes, for example, the "fresh" tomatoes available for much of the year are hard and flavorless, bred and picked purely for their storage characteristics.

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Ingredients for pickled beetroots in the jar

How to Pickle Beetroot in Malt Vinegar

Beetroot, informally shortened to beet, is a deep-red root vegetable often used in soups, stews, salads and pastas. It tastes sugary with a mild tartness, similar to a combination of sweet carrots and fresh spinach. Pickle beetroot in malt vinegar to enhance its flavor and preserve it for later use.

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Tomatoes in a basket

Tomato Intolerance and Digestive Symptoms

Whether you love to top your pasta with its sauce or just love eating them straight off of the vine, tomatoes are a healthy fruit and a rich source of vitamins A and C, as well as folic acid.

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Disadvantages of GM Tomatoes

In the world of rapidly progressing agricultural technology, genetically modified foods are the subject of many debates. Tomatoes were the first commercially produced genetically modified, or GM, food.

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A basket of tomatoes and celery stalks

Nutritional Value of Tomatoes for Pregnancy

During pregnancy, you generally need a little more than the recommended daily allowance of vitamins and nutrients to make sure your baby grows healthy and strong. This doesn't mean extra servings of junk food, however. While your child grows, you need to feed yourself nutritious meals.

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Tomato Salad

Nutritional Value of Tomatoes & Cucumbers

A cucumber and a tomato are available year-round and are in season in the summer. They combine to create a simple Mediterranean salad with olive oil, or a garden salad with leafy green lettuce. The varieties of cucumbers are diverse, but most have a similar flavor.

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tomato sauce with basil

The Advantages of Tomato Sauce

Tomato sauce does wonders for the flavor of a plate of spaghetti or a slice of pizza, but the red sauce also provides essential nutrients. A cup of tomato sauce contains a quarter of your recommended daily intake of vitamin A and fulfills half of your daily need for vitamin C.

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tomato sauce

Tomato Paste Vs. Puree for Recipes

Tomato paste and tomato puree are available commercially throughout the U.S., although home gardeners can also can or freeze these products at home. Both are made from tomatoes, with no added ingredients, but variances in cooking methods result in two completely different products.

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tomato sauce

Is There Any Way to Make Tomato Sauce Less Acidic?

Tomatoes are extremely high in ascorbic acid, also known as vitamin C. Ascorbic acid is a powerful antioxidant, but it also can make for unpleasantly acidic tomato sauce. Fixing acidic sauce is possible, but it takes a little bit of adjusting and experimenting.

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Fresh tomatoes in the garden

Oxalic Acid in Tomatoes

Oxalate is a chemical compound that occurs naturally in almost every plant to some degree, including fruit, vegetable and grain plants. Oxalate is usually located in leaves or bark, where the compound binds with calcium to remove it when plants go through their seasonal shedding.

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How Do I Moisten a Dried-Up Meatloaf?

Meatloaf gets a bad rap in American culture, but it wasn’t always that way. During the lean years of World War II, ground beef was relatively inexpensive and breadcrumbs and eggs stretched a little bit of meat along way. President Harry Truman famously called meatloaf and tomato sauce his favorite meal, "Cooking Light"

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side profile of a young woman biting into a tomato

How Many Calories Does a Tomato Have?

Tomatoes provide significant amounts of vitamin C, potassium, lycopene and other nutrients, in a very low-calorie package. Their calorie count depends on several variables, including color and size.

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Chicken baked with vegetables

Is it Ok to Cook Tomato Dishes in Metal Pans?

Few things are more frustrating than putting time and energy into a recipe only to have it turn out badly. While low-quality ingredients, the wrong heat setting and poor technique can each befoul a perfect dish, when you're cooking with tomatoes, the pan you choose counts, too.

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Spaghetti and meatballs with sauce

The Health Benefits of Eating Cooked Tomato Products

Cooked tomato products can be many different things, including stewed tomatoes, tomato paste, tomato sauce and ketchup. Tomatoes fall into the category of red and orange vegetables, and the Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2010 recommends people eat more of them.

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Clear Tomato Soup

How to Cook With Frozen Tomatoes

When the bounty of fresh-picked tomatoes overflows in late summer, a quick solution is to put all the extras in the freezer. This home preservation method simply requires rinsing, cutting out the cores and setting the tomatoes on a pan to freeze individually.

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