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Side note: the reason pasta sauces made with canned tomato base taste so much better than pasta sauce from scratch is that the water taken out from the canned s
by acalzycalzy 4y ago
Side note: the reason pasta sauces made with canned tomato base taste so much better than pasta sauce from scratch is that the water taken out from the canned stuff is done with a vaccum evaporizer: it’s able to boil out the water at a temp of 140F vs 212F on a stove top. Less heat == more flavor
- stcroixx 4y agoI don’t think I’ve ever had a canned or jarred sauce that was even close in taste to even the most basic homemade version.
- Larrikin 4y agoCanned whole tomatoes used in recipes are not comparable in any way to canned or jarred premade tomato sauce.
- SamBam 4y agoI don't think OP was referring to jarred sauces, rather home-made sauces made using canned (tinned) tomatoes, as opposed to fresh. The majority of Italian tomato-based sauces call for canned tomatoes.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- blooalien 4y ago> "Less heat == more flavor" … And that's why my grandma insisted on an all-day (and sometimes all-night) low temperature simmer for such sauces instead of trying to "boil the life out of it" as she used to put it. You can totally taste the difference though. There's a "richness" to a slow-simmered sauce you just don't get from a hurried boil or any sort of quick thickeners.
- Larrikin 4y agoIn what country are you based? I've heard from pretty much every cooking source I follow that the reason canned taste better than fresh is because nearly all US tomato varieties sold fresh have been bred for their ability to be picked early, be transported long distances, hit with ethylene gas, and look good in the store. Taste isn't a factor in those tomatoes, in fact the grainy thick inner walls and small flavorful jelly sacks help in transportation. Fresh tomatoes in other country tend to be far better with much bigger jelly sacks. Canned tomatoes don't have an in store look to worry about and are different varieties. The canning process might help in sauce creation but isn't the main factor in the US
- cafard 4y agoAmen on the US tomato varieties. They ship beautifully, they will sustain any handling gentler than a baseball bat, and they taste like nothing in particular. We eat fresh tomatoes from mid-summer through early fall, when local farms have tomatoes bred to eat rather than to ship.
- AlbertCory 4y agoThat's what I've always heard, but OP's explanation also makes sense.
- Gibbon1 4y agoMy mother used to strangely do audits for canneries. You are correct. All the tomato's that arrive from the field nice and ripe get canned.
- samstave 4y agoA bit of an aside on the canned-tomato piece ; I exclusively buy Classico Sauce, because for the price of the sauce that you get, you also get an ATLAS Mason Jar... with oz markings as well in the glass... So for sometimes, $2 you get a 16oz of all sorts of flavors of sauce, and a Mason jar to boot. - Also, since this is HN - the Mason Jar was basically either invented by or perfected by the BALL brothers. The BALL brothers evolved from inventing the mason jar to making some of the most sophisticated and, I believe, top secret components for a lot of stuff that winds up in orbit...
- sojournerc 4y agoI think you haven't had good sauce made from scratch. The key is a base of mushroom broth, with roasted garlic, and good tomatoes. I don't disagree that a lot of home made sauces don't compare, but done right, traditional recipes are far better. Don't repeat your thinking in Italy...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- wackget 4y agoGot any recommended recipes to try?
- sojournerc 4y agoNot a recipe exactly, but... Mushroom broth from a pound of baby Bella. Clove of garlic, confit in oil until brown. Can of Merazano tomatoes. Combine, slow simmer with fresh oregano. Blend, salt to taste. Better than any can sauce I've had
- schoen 4y agoI happened to buy some mushroom broth powder at an Italian grocery store recently, so maybe I can try using it for this; do you know how that's likely to compare to a broth made from fresh mushrooms?
- quantum_magpie 4y agoYou disagree with the OP about canned tomatoes, and then in your recipe you use.. canned tomatoes?
- sojournerc 4y agoYou're right. I had misread their comment
- wackget 4y ago
- Syzygies 4y agoTom Colicchio, Thomas Keller, Paul Bertoli and many other chefs have their version of "precious tomatoes", a tomato confit. None of these recipes scale. After many years of struggling with home dehydrators, I bought one of those full sheet pan carts you see in bakeries, enclosed it in nice plywood, added a 1500W wall heater, brewery temperature regulator, and a crawl space fan that looks like it belongs in a stereo rack. The top and bottom sheet pans serve as buffers and spares, but the middle six sheet pans (lined with silpat) can process 60 lbs of heirloom garden tomatoes at a time. We often grow twenty plants and supply family and friends, so this scale is necessary. We skin, slice, spread onto oiled silpat, salt, and partially dry tomatoes till "gooshy", about 25% of original wet weight. We then vacuum pack 220g or so to a pouch, and store in a chest freezer till needed. This equipment also makes great southern Italian concentrated tomato paste, "estrattu". My favorite tomatoes for these are dry-farmed Santa Cruz Early Girls, which I'm put up in a blind taste test against any tomato grown in Italy. Cleanup is pretty easy, on the lawn with an electric pressure washer. This is a good time to give one's molcajete a cleaning too, if the coarse stone has been trapping food. I can't eat canned tomatoes; I have to avoid tomato dishes in even the fanciest Italian restaurants. It baffles me why no one is doing what I do on a commercial scale to supply their restaurants, selling the extra through Eataly.
- WaxProlix 4y agoOh my god, not sure if they were specifically that variety but we used to get dry farmed tomatoes from the farmers market in Santa Cruz and they were incredible. Too expensive for me to make a sauce out of at the time, so they just went on bread or with cheeses usually. Really great tomatoes out there. I wonder if I could get a crate shipped...
- magneticnorth 4y agoCan you grow your own tomatoes? I've also had Californian dry-farmed early girls, and those are definitely the best tomatoes I've ever paid for. That said, I think home-grown early girls or other small flavorful varieties are equally good even if you can't properly dry-farm them, so long as you can let them stay on the vine until fully ripe.
- epolanski 4y agoAs an Italian I find your post quite wrong for so many reasons, most importantly because there's an endless amount of recipes and because in Italy alone we have hundreds of different tomatoes in color, size, sweetness, acidity taste and methods of preparation. Pasta made with fresh tomatoes is absolutely great and it is ridiculous to even think the opposite. The boiling is only done for some kind of tomatoes and it is done to peel it, heat does not make it lose any flavor.
- tptacek 4y agoThat's fascinating and all, but vacuum dehydration does in fact preserve volatiles (the same way rotovap vacuum distillation preserves volatiles in liqueurs), and canned tomatoes generally are better than out-of-season fresh tomatoes.
- GiorgioG 4y ago[flagged]
- epolanski 4y agoThe user I was answering literally asserted that canned tomatoes taste better as if it was an _undebatable truth_ and I'm being arrogant saying that there's countless of different tomatoes and recipes? Being Italian does not mean projecting that everything Italian is the best, but it sure means having eaten the same dish literally thousands of times for yor entire life prepared in countless ways. Not sure what prompted you to add nothing to the discussion.
- cmrdporcupine 4y agoWe also have hundreds of varieties of tomatoes in the Americas. Because, hey, y'know what...? Tomatoes are from here.
- rcme 4y ago> Because, hey, y'know what...? Tomatoes are from here. That's really irrelevant to the conversation.
- lucideer 4y agoThere's huge variation in taste of both canned tomatoes & passata between different brands, and I've made much better pasta sauce with fresh tomatoes than a can. When they've been good, in-season local tomatoes. I've also made worse pasta sauce with fresh tomatoes in winter. I'm fairly sure the quality of the ingredients will have a much bigger impact than temp. That said, cooking on a low heat for as long as possible does give you the best results.
- giardia 4y ago> pasta sauces made with canned tomato base taste so much better than pasta sauce from scratch That's a matter of taste, to say the least. You could probably come up with all sorts of metrics that show that canned tomatoes have more of this or that, but pasta sauce made with fresh tomatoes taste like tomatoes, canned tomatoes taste like imitation tomatoes or almost like ketchup in comparison. It sounds like you might've not reduced the fresh tomato sauce enough or something. I won't deny that I use canned 99.99% of the time though. They win on every metric except taste.
- ghshephard 4y agoTomatoes are one of the few exceptions when it comes to canning - they always taste fresher and more tomato like than fresh store bought tomatoes - and are preferred in most recipes. The third option, would be garden fresh/farm delivered tomatoes - but they have a shelf like of about 3 days and can't handle transport - so the odds of seeing them outside of a farmers market (or your backyard garden) - are next to nil.
- bigDinosaur 4y agoIt is not the case that canned tomatoes taste fresher at least in my experience. For one they have acidity added - on top of already acidic tomatoes - to reduce the risk of botulism or they're heated in the can which gives them a slightly odd taste, certainly not the same as freshly picked ripe tomatoes. Maybe I've just only ever had inferior canned tomatoes, or the tomatoes I've grown have been particularly good.
- pigsty 4y agoI do think everyone here is making the point that store-bought tomatoes are inferior to canned ones. Home-grown vegetables picked and consumed at the peak of ripeness will always be better than store-bought and artificially ripened, and the likelihood of them being better than canned/frozen is pretty high.
- 4y ago
- wodenokoto 4y agoIsn't it more that tomatoes are canned when ripe, while fresh tomatoes are ripened after picking.
- Ekaros 4y agoBut aren't the cans in commercial canning heated to much higher temperatures for preservation? Even if nothing is evaporated.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]