I pretty much go without in the winter. But there are some things that just need that color. So I just buy anything with no expectation of good taste.

Yeah, sometimes you have to...I'll buy a few during the winter for burgers or tacos. The local grocery has mostly romas(Mexico) and hothouse slicers(Canada), usually about $2/lb. I keep home-growns in the freezer for salsa making.

I go without once I can't find them at the farmer's market anymore (and they had them until Thanksgiving this year).

I buy campari tomatoes in the winter. They're not as awesome as this link makes them out to be, but they're better than any other tomatoes I've found in the stores.

http://www.camparitomatoes.com/about/index.html

A hamburger or grilled cheese just isn't the same without a
slice of tomato. The acidity, the juice, the texture; hidden in a bunch of Nueske's slow fried crispy bacon, lettuce and mayo, ummm. Good enough to ignore any protests
from my taste buds.
Anyway, I've had plenty of dry, mealy and otherwise not-so-
tasty tomatoes during the choice season too.

Will definetly try the campari when I find it. Meantime, I
am ok with the 'brown' 'mato. And, I actually plan to save
some seeds for next summer.

Hope you all had a wonderful Christmas! Pondy

If I do buy then,they are on the vine ,seem to have alittle taste

I know this is an old thread, but I gotta chip in.

I grow tomatoes MOSTLY because you can NEVER get tomatoes in the store that are as spectacular in taste as what you grow. (But it doesn't do much good to grow Romas or Early Girls since they don't taste that great even when you grow them at home.) Anything else I grow in my garden is for fun, but with tomatoes it is simply because you can't get 'em unless you grow 'em.

That being said, I MUST EAT TOMATOES. And if I HAVE to buy tomatoes, like in winter time, I have often found surprisingly good flavor with the following:

1. Kumato. Pretty spectacular for a store tomato. Worth buying. Probably better than a lot of people (who stick with common commercial varieties) do grow in their garden.

2. Campari. Decent. Acceptable. A good enough tomato when you can't find anything better. Easily beats 99 percent of store tomatoes.

3. Sunburst (Yellow cherry tomato that is medium large for a cherry. Very good flavor, most of the time. I buy mine from Costco in a 3 pound plastic box.)

4. SOME of the grape tomatoes in boxes.

5. Hot house, picked ripe, tomatoes on the vine. These used to be better, until EVERYONE seemed to realize it, and started growing inferior tomatoes that still look good but taste like cardboard, despite being supposedly "ripe on the vine".
That is bout it, most of the time. It is no wonder that 90 percent of people who "don't like" tomatoes think they are tasteless pieces of garbage. All they have ever eaten are store-bought tomatoes that are bred for looks, but not for flavor, then grown and shipped greeen green green.

If anyone hasn't seen Kumato yet, it is a true medium sized, perfectly round, black (brown) tomato with green shoulders. It is obviously a hybrid, and apparently grown in a hothouse. They are generally sold in a plastic package with 5 tomatoes in it, and cost about a dollar a tomato, but if you don't have any of your own, it is far and away the best substitute I've seen.