Beefsteak tomato

This article needs more citations. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Beefsteak tomato" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (June 2012) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

A beef tomato (British English) or beefsteak tomato (American English) is a large tomato. Grown on the plant Solanum lycopersicum, it is one of the largest varieties of cultivated tomatoes, regularly at 20 cm (7.9 in) in diameter with some weighing 450 g (1 lb) or more. Most are pink or red with numerous small seed compartments (locules) distributed throughout the fruit, sometimes displaying pronounced ribbing similar to ancient pre-Columbian tomato cultivars. While popular among home growers for beef sandwich toppings and other applications requiring a large tomato such as toppings on large steaks, beefsteaks are not grown commercially as often as other types, since they are not considered as suitable for mechanization as smaller slicing tomatoes. Non-commercially, however, they are the most popularly grown tomato in North America.

Common varieties

• Beefmaster VFN, a popular hybrid beefsteak
• Beefsteak VFN
• Big Beef
• Brandywine, (a pink heirloom variety)
• Bucking Bronco
• Cherokee Purple, a dusky red/purple beefsteak, said to have exceptional flavour
• Marmande
• Mortgage Lifter, another popular heirloom variety
• Pink Beefsteak

In Italy and France

You can help expand this section with text translated from the corresponding article in Italian. (December 2025) Click [show] for important translation instructions. View a machine-translated version of the Italian article. Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must follow the LLM translation guideline, revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Consider adding a topic to this template: there are already 427 articles in the main category, and specifying|topic= will aid in categorization. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing Italian Wikipedia article at [[:it:pomodoro cuore di bue]]; see its history for attribution. You may also add the template {{Translated|it|pomodoro cuore di bue}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.

Both in Italy and France, a variety of beefsteak tomato known as cuore di bue (Italian) or cœur de bœuf (French) is produced, so-named as it resembles an ox's heart pointing downwards.

In Italy, the cuore di bue has been given prodotto agroalimentare tradizionale certification, but no similar strict recognition has been granted in France. Despite a French rule that forbid to sold beefsteak tomato under the name cœur de bœuf (French)some companies continue naming other beefsteak tomatoes with different qualities cœur de bœuf.

See also

• List of tomato cultivars

References

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Beefsteak (tomato).

This fruit-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by adding missing information.

• v
• t
• e

This Solanales article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by adding missing information.

• v
• t
• e

This vegetable-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by adding missing information.

• v
• t
• e