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Home > Sangre Celestial > Tomatoes hit their summer peak at farmers markets
Podcast: Sangre Celestial
Episode:

Tomatoes hit their summer peak at farmers markets
Category: Arts
Duration: 00:00:00
Publish Date: 2025-08-01 19:00:00
Description: At the Hotel Bel-Air , chef Joe Garcia is celebrating the glory of summer tomatoes. "The tomatoes, as the seasons change and they taste more like what a tomato should taste like, that defines what I do with them," Joe says. Earlier in the season, when they're not as sweet, he's more likely to cook them. "But where they are right now, which I think is the peak, I try to serve them in their more natural state." At the Hotel Bel-Air, chef Joe Garcia incorporates tomatoes into a salad drizzled with a tomato coulis. Photo by Joe Garcia. He's currently offering a salad where he blends tomatoes with white balsamic vinegar and salt to make a coulis, then removes the seeds and the skins, and drizzles that juice on the plate. Then, he places several varieties of small tomatoes, halved or quartered, on top, sprinkles them with kosher salt, adds baby Thai basil, intersperses cucumber, and pours on a bit of olive oil. "It's the simplest salad but it's super flavorful," Joe says. Crucial to its flavor are Magic Mountain tomatoes from Country Rhodes Family Farm . Located in Ivanhoe near Visalia , it's run by Phil Rhodes, whose family has been farming in the area since the 1940s. He's a familiar face to anyone who frequents the Saturday Santa Monica or Sunday Beverly Hills farmers markets but he's new to the Wednesday Santa Monica Farmers Market . If the rubbery, flavorless, pale pink tomatoes at most grocery stores have gotten you down, this is the perfect time to snag some farmers market tomatoes. Photo by Laryl Garcia/KCRW Like many farmers, Phil has been struggling. "My little farm is not high-value land," he says. "It has one source of water. So I got my first new water bill, which was on a fairly wet year, and that was 500. That's one new bill that I didn't used to have. My liability insurance tripled this year, went from 3,000 to 9,000 and that's happened to a lot of farmers. Auto insurance is going up… Energy costs. It all just compiles." Labor is also a huge concern. "Not to get political there, I can't get crews to come to LA right now. It's like they're scared to come to LA," Phil says. Throw in the lingering effects of the Covid-19 pandemic and the recent Palisades and Eaton fires, and Country Rhodes, like many California farms, is facing profound challenges.
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