Raw means uncooked, not unripe. They taste sharper and have their skins on, and the seeds are with their gel and juice, between the firm fleshy parts. When tomatoes are cooked, often the first step is to drop them in boiling water for a minute, take them out, and slide the skins off. Because the skin gets tough when cooked. The other thing that happens in cooking is that the flesh softens and the seeds migrate so it’s all more or less the same texture. The flavor gets sweeter too.
Personally I like raw tomatoes and cooked equally, but they are different.
Just sounds so weird, people calling regular tomartoes “raw” lmao. Is that a thing somewhere in the world, maybe the US? They like their stuff factory done lol
Raw cherry tomatoes or grape tomatoes would go along with raw carrots and raw celery and raw cauliflower and raw bell peppers and other raw vegetables on a crudité platter. Guess what “cru” and “crudités” means in French?
The point being that these are all vegetables that can also be served cooked. (Unlike lettuce which is ruined by cooking. I tried it once, blech.) But when dipping, you want that firmness and fresh taste.
It’s not a US thing, or anything special, you just seem to have an exaggerated idea of what the word raw means. Maybe you’re confused because it can also mean naked (“in Equus, he appeared on stage in the raw”) or chafed/chapped (“his nose was red and raw from the snowstorm”) or unedited/unfiltered (“the raw data suggests Hillary Clinton will win the 2016 election”). But in this case it just means uncooked/unheated. It could be sliced and spiced and still be raw.
Btw, we don’t default to cooked or canned tomatoes, we would specify those as well, for instance in a pasta or chili recipe.
