I adore tomatoes; they can be prepared in so many different ways from salads to purées; and they are themselves so diverse in shape, texture, sweetness, acidity and even colour. If you have read my recent book, A Taste of My Life, you will know that when I think about the tastes of childhood, the flavour that is most exciting and poignant for me is the fragrance, and sweetness/acidity combination, of a really good, ripe tomato - these are sensations that shout "summer!" to me.

At home we grew the large variety called Marmande, fat, juicy and meaty. They weren't of a uniform size or shape, but their knobbly, mismatched humps, bumps and lumps and patches of yellow or green breaking up their solid red colour, make them even more attractive to me now; and they seem to do the same for other real tomato lovers, as these are the irregularities that nowadays signal precious heirloom tomato varieties.

Somehow we've all become aware that the flavour of a tomato has an inverse relationship to a perfect, unblemished, regular surface. Another thing we've all learned recently is that different varieties of tomatoes serve different purposes. Whether you bake them, stuff them, roast them, make them into soups or sauces, or eat them raw in salads, there's an ideal variety for each purpose.

For perfect tomato salads you can't beat Marmande, though heart-shaped Coeur de Boeuf also slices beautifully, and its thick walls make it good for stuffing. At home we picked them while still very firm, so that they wouldn't fall to the ground ripe, and bruise. Maman Blanc finished ripening them on the window sill, then sliced and dressed them with an emulsified red wine and Dijon mustard vinaigrette.

The Italian San Marzano is the tomato to use for sauce. Named for the town near Naples, this plum variety has thick walls, relatively few seeds, and not too much juice, so that you don't have to reduce the sauce so much. The taste is intensely sweet, with relatively low acidity.

For cherry tomatoes I've found the yellow-orange Sungold to be the sweetest. It seems to be an old variety, and ripens easily and crops heavily in most garden conditions. It can be used to make "tomato essence," a dish that suggested itself to me when I remembered that the most exquisite, deepest tomato-y flavour was always the little pool of liquid left at the bottom of the tomato salad bowl.

We experimented repeatedly to reproduce this stunning, extreme flavour of sweet, ripe tomato with length and balance given by acidity, strong, but refined and delicate. In the end we found it came from coarsely chopping 2 kg of ripe, good cherry tomatoes, and marinating them with two leaves of tarragon, three or four shredded basil leaves, a tiny bit of finely sliced fennel, some slice onion, a few drops each of Worcestershire sauce, Tabasco and Angostura bitters, a few pinches of seal salt and a couple of dashes of red wine vinegar, which your drip through two layers of muslin, overnight in the fridge. It yields four 200ml portions of clear golden liquid that captures the quintessence of tomato-ness.

We wouldn't have discovered what variety was best for making essence if it weren't for the trials carried out by the gardening team at Le Manoir, headed by Anne Marie Owens. Our trials continue, and this year we'll look at the Japanese Black Trifele Tomato (aka, "Black Russian Truffel Tomato"), a plum tomato cultivated in Russia, which some say has an extraordinary richness; and Beefsteak, the huge, handsome American variety.