Taste-wise, is there a difference between tomato from a blender vs. chopped tomato?

Question

A chicken curry recipe and a mixed vegetables recipe require chopping tomatoes and frying them immediately after the onions and ginger-garlic paste are fried. But since this causes the tomato skin to be left behind as thin spindles, I considered making the tomatoes into a paste in a blender.

Although it formed a nice gravy, I noticed that the tomato taste was more prominent, and the taste of the green chillies, pepper and few other spices were not very noticeable.

I'm not sure if it was the blending of the tomatoes that caused this or whether I added too many tomatoes (I added just enough of them that the recipe required). So I wanted to know if blending tomatoes can actually make such a difference in taste that it can overpower the flavour of other spices? If anyone knows about this, I'd just like to know the technical difference between using blended tomatoes vs. chopped tomatoes. Being Indian, I enjoy the "hotness" of chillies and spices, and don't want the tomato to hide those flavours and tastes.

Answer 1

Besides the issue with seeds and jelly that have already been mentioned, there's also the simple issue that the liquid tomatoes just coat everything else.

This means that when bits of food come in contact with your tongue, they've already been coated in tomato juice, so the flavor is going to be more noticeable. When you have chunks, the flavors don't meld quite so much, and you have bursts of tomato flavor when you bite into a tomato chunk, but you don't necessarily coat the other chunks of stuff in tomato flavor.

If you're only dealing with a couple of tomatoes, you can fillet the skins off rather than having to boil water to loosen them.

Answer 2

It may depend on how much blending they got.

I find that if you blend them for too long or too fast, you strip the 'jelly' part from the seeds, then the seeds themselves start to break up. That tends to make it bitter, & I suspect that could be what you're tasting.

My standard trick to homemade sieved tomatoes is first I rough chop them - you really don't need much more than cutting them in half [If you do them whole, they tend to go pop]. Then I microwave them just long enough to heat them through & start to soften - depending on quantity you might need to give them a bit of a stir a couple of times. This doesn't need to be very thorough & they don't need to be completely evenly heated.

That should soften them up just enough that you can blend them for just a few seconds & not risk starting to grind the seeds.

Push through a sieve with a ladle & you're good to go.

I would really only tend to go to this kind of effort if my recipe needed a kilo of tomatoes, rather than 3 or 4. For just a few, I'd simply chop them finer & no-one will ever spot the rolled up skin segments.