janetdoe

You're buying the wrong canned tomatoes. Tomato cans should be lined with an inert epoxy layer that prevents the tomatoes from contacting metal. Alternatively, some organic companies sell tomatoes in glass bottles.

Unless you grow your own tomatoes, or you get your from a farmers market at the peak of ripeness, I find canned tomatoes to be superior in flavor to fresh tomatoes. Canned tomatoes are almost certainly superior to anything you can get at a supermarket, where the tomatoes are picked green and gassed to make them turn pink/red.

Unless I am making pico de gallo, I use canned tomatoes for salsa.

When I do need fresh tomatoes out of season, I use Campari tomatoes or tomatoes "on the vine". I find these are more likely to taste ripe and less likely to be mealy. I previously used Roma/plum tomatoes, but it seems that over the past decade, all of the flavor has been bred out of Romas in favor of shelf life, and half the time they are very mealy.

Agreed (except for tomatillo...) One of the strangest things in the Dallas area is that some restaurants serve salsa warm. Blech.