📌 Quick Summary (TL;DR): Giant Italian Paste
- 🌍 Origin: A classic Italian heirloom paste variety. Very popular among European and Russian seed collectors (like V. Popenko) for its processing qualities.
- 🌿 Plant Habit: Indeterminate. Can grow exceptionally tall, with some growers reporting vines reaching 10 ft (3 m) in a greenhouse. Like many heart-shaped or large paste tomatoes, it has a “weeping” or spindly foliage habit with long, thin, frail-looking branches.
- 🍅 Fruit Characteristics: Large, elongated plum/paste tomatoes. They turn a deep red when ripe and usually weigh between 5.3 and 10.5 oz (150-300 g).
- 👅 Flavor & Use: This is a dedicated processing tomato. The flesh is very dense, meaty, and high in dry matter (high solids) with very little juice or gel. While it can taste somewhat dry or bland if eaten fresh, it is absolutely top-tier for making thick sauces, ketchup, paste, or sun-dried tomatoes.
Seeds were from V. Popenko. His description: “Giant Italian Paste, Italy. Plum-shaped fruits, red, good flavor, weighing up to 10.5 oz (300 g).”
I grew it in the greenhouse. Pruned it to 2 main stems. As of July 14, there were 12 fruits. 1st truss – 10 fruits, 2nd truss – 2 fruits. Fruit weight was around 5.3-7 oz (150-200 g). It was such a funny-looking plant, it had these super long, skinny, paw-like branches. The taste is sweet, the fruits are on the dry side—what they call having a high dry matter content.
What are your overall impressions of this tomato? Was it productive? Is it worth repeating?
I don’t know 😕. Looking around for reviews on the forum… Found one from Katrinka:
Giant Italian Paste – didn’t impress me at all… Somewhat hollow inside, tasteless, low yield for me…
A gorgeous, favorite variety. It gets a permanent spot in my grow list forever.
The plant was 10 ft (3 meters) tall. Set trusses perfectly. The tomatoes are on the dry side inside, which makes them absolutely ideal for making tomato paste, sauces, ketchup, and for sun-drying.
Notice the completely opposite reviews here! Katrinka says the tomato was “hollow inside and tasteless,” while Oksana calls it a “gorgeous favorite” that she will grow forever. Why the massive difference? It all comes down to what you expect a tomato to do!
Giant Italian Paste is bred specifically for processing. Real paste/sauce tomatoes (like San Marzano or Opalka) are genetically designed to have very little gel, low water content, high dry matter (pectin/solids), and yes—sometimes semi-hollow cavities. If you slice one open and eat it raw in a salad, it will often taste mealy, dry, and bland. But if you roast it, boil it down into a thick marinara, or put it in a dehydrator? That “bland” dry flesh transforms into the richest, sweetest, most intense tomato flavor imaginable!
