I have very similar memories as a child, and also find it very difficult to get good tomatoes. There's great looking tomatoes, but they don't smell or taste right, and they are either too hard or floury mealy things.
When I can get good tomatoes - my favourite thing is to have them on toast. Just slice the tomato, put it on some toast with butter, (or olive oil). Breakfast, lunch, dinner... it's simple but delicious.
Anna Bay, just north of Newcastle in NSW, Australia used to have fantastic tomatoes. It was renowned in the region for it's fantastic tomatoes. The area had a huge flood of Italian immigrants just post WW2, and they brought the tomatoes with them.
You'd see a few little road-side stalls on the road to Nelson Bay. The supermarkets took over and those little stalls disappeared. Then some opportunistic folks set up stalls using commercially grown tomatoes from others selling them as Anna Bay tomatoes, but they're not the same.
Unfortunately this tactic seems to be becoming more common. We found someone selling Peaches and Nectarines by the side of the road. They offered us a sample, it was amazing. We bought two boxes at a reasonable price, they were almost all awful. Had the same thing with Cherries.
I also grew up eating traditional tomatoes, my favourite thing to do is toasting a slice of sourdough bread then cutting a tomato in half and smashing the two halves on the bread (it's a similar process to making smashed avo on toast - it won't work with supermarket tomatoes because they're too hard and not juicy enough); I add olive oil, a pinch of salt and sometimes oregano.
If you have a Harris Farm Markets near you (I think there is one in Newcastle which is not too far from Anna Bay), look for the "heirloom tomatoes" - they are usually placed in a basket as a mix of different heirloom varieties and you can pick the ones you like, they are traditional tomatoes, not the ones you usually see in supermarkets.
The smashed-tomato thing seems... inappropriate to do to a nice tomato. I'm sure it tastes great.
I'm no longer in NSW, but Coles recently had some "Heirloom Tomatoes" which looked like the ones from the article. Smelled great, but were all floury in the middle. Transport and cold storage seems to do bad things to them.
There's another fruit & veg shop nearby that sometimes has good tomatoes, but even at their best nothing like the Anna Bay tomatoes.
When I can get good tomatoes - my favourite thing is to have them on toast. Just slice the tomato, put it on some toast with butter, (or olive oil). Breakfast, lunch, dinner... it's simple but delicious.
Anna Bay, just north of Newcastle in NSW, Australia used to have fantastic tomatoes. It was renowned in the region for it's fantastic tomatoes. The area had a huge flood of Italian immigrants just post WW2, and they brought the tomatoes with them.
You'd see a few little road-side stalls on the road to Nelson Bay. The supermarkets took over and those little stalls disappeared. Then some opportunistic folks set up stalls using commercially grown tomatoes from others selling them as Anna Bay tomatoes, but they're not the same.
Unfortunately this tactic seems to be becoming more common. We found someone selling Peaches and Nectarines by the side of the road. They offered us a sample, it was amazing. We bought two boxes at a reasonable price, they were almost all awful. Had the same thing with Cherries.