Biologically, tomatoes are fruit. Culinarily, tomatoes are vegetables.
I don’t think vegetable sounds right either. No one crushes up broccoli or carrots to make sauce for pizza and you don’t add tomatoes to your roast veggies.
Okay but if someone offered me a pizza with broccoli or carrot sauce I’d have to politely, but firmly refuse
I love playing around with recipes so have indeed made broc and carrot sauces, but this is kind of all about what feels right to say. And I think that there’s a lot of cases where it feels wrong to describe tomato as a vegetable. Kind of how I’d feel odd calling lettuce a vegetable.
People put carrots in pizza sauce, like Rao’s: https://www.raos.com/products/pizza-sauce
And roasted tomatoes are great with some peppers and onions.
I dunno, even in a culinary sense, tomatoes are way too acidic to lump in with vegetables imo. The textures are totally different from veggies too
Which veggies? Eggplant, zucchini, and potatoes all have very different textures.
The difference is in flavor. Veggies are savory and fruits are sweet.
First, eggplants and zucchini are fruits too, and both are sweet, just not banana-sweet (in fact, try zucchini bread if you haven’t - best shit ever). Second, many veggies are sweet, like carrots, onions (though it’s masked until cooked), and …uh… sweet potatoes. Third, good tomatoes are absolutely sweet, not like candy but especially the little salad tomatoes aren’t very far removed from a grape, which I think we agree are a fruit. Then there’s olives, that bizarrely savory, dark fruit. They’re delicious but I’m pretty sure they’re from another planet.
So overall I think, if we’re going to go by flavor, then imo acidity is the least ambiguous differentiator. Still not perfect, I’d rather just call it a fruit if it has seeds and isn’t a pod. I’ll give it to you on texture though
