[lathyrus_long]

Beyond genetics and environment, soil/nutrient fertility also affects the taste. For example, drought-stressing tomatoes near harvest generally improves flavor at the cost of yield, both by the obvious mechanism of adding less water and by more complicated interactions with the biosynthesis of flavor compounds.

In hydroponics the same improvement is achieved by increasing the nutrient solution concentration (since that's what drought stress looks like to the roots), often literally with salt, NaCl. Growers will typically describe this as raising the solution electrical conductivity, EC, since that's an easily-measured proxy for total dissolved ionic stuff. Hand-held EC meters cost a few dollars, or large systems often run with closed-loop measurement and dosing similar to my

https://github.com/hydromisc/hydromisc