What does it taste like? Incredible as it may seem, it tastes just like a tomato, a honest-to-goodness real no-frills tomato, and that is what makes it so radically different from the pitiful stuff we have grown used to.

Blame it all on a system that allows fruits and vegetables to be raised, harvested and packed hundreds or thousands of miles away from where they will eventually be eaten, coupled with a high, steady consumer demand. This means that farmers not only have to harvest their crop well before it has reached its prime, they even have to pluck and pack it when it is still ghastly green and has the consistency of corrugated cardboard. Retail grocers demand a few days' extra margin for their bulk produce before it starts to spoil in the bins.

All these factors serve to move up the date vegetables are harvested to weeks ahead of their optimum. And that produces exactly one result: the fruits and vegetables that reach our table are for all intents and purposes devoid of taste and interest. At the same time, vegetables that bruise easily in transit and have been all but eliminated from the market, as have those that do not look nice. So what we do get is free of mottling, bumps, spots and flaws, and as identical in size, texture, shape and thickness as if they had come fresh off some factory assembly line.�

In Spain alone around 350 varieties of tomatoes have vanished from our tables, to be replaced by a few beauty-contest winners that are easy to raise, store and ship.

On the Origins of the Tomato
We have Christopher Columbus to thank for introducing us to this fruit, which has adapted so readily to European soil, climate and taste preferences. Over the past 500 years, different tomato varieties were grown in different areas of the country to take advantage of the ones that were best match for local conditions. This method, however, has become a thing of the past, displaced by a system in which uniformity of product is the only result that matters.

The Raff
It's nothing much to look at, but you can tell that it is a real tomato, flavourful and fleshy, more meat that seed on the inside, and about as far as you can get from the stereotyped product we've become used to seeing that comes wrapped in an armour plate skin, full of seeds and without so much as a hint of taste.

By being allowed to properly mature on the vine, the Raff gets a chance to develop the aroma and flavour that set them apart from the green-picked products we are used to seeing in the market, they'll remind you of the tomatoes you used pick on a little garden plot or from among the geraniums in a window box.

The problem is their fairly high price, which is directly related to its production costs. Farmers in Almeria and Murcia who take the trouble of growing Raff tomatoes have two major problems:�the short growing and marketing season, (from the end of February to the end of May) and the low yield per acre this crops gives.

If you take these an add the factor that many growers adopt for ecological methods and eschew the use of chemical fertilizers and insecticides, plus the fact that they tend to ripen at different times, requiring several return vests to the fields it is apparent that quality comes at a price.

How to eat your Raff tomatoes
Sliced thin or in chunks, sprinkled with a little sea salt and a few drops of extra virgin oil with an acidity no greater than 0.8%, so that it doesn't spoil that incredible taste.

If we take a fine air cured serrano ham sliced paper thin, the humble tomato becomes something ineffably grander than itself. Okay, the same goes for when they complement some iberico cold cuts, a good quality salchich�n, caviar with farmhouse cheese, Villal�n cheese with a few basil leaves, and a touch of herbs. And yes, of course, you can eat it in salads, too.

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