A Jarring Discovery: The Good and The Bad of Store-Bought Pasta Sauce

A Jarring Discovery: The Good and The Bad of Store-Bought Pasta Sauce David Rosengarten

Rosengarten Classic. Originally Published: ROSENGARTEN REPORT, March 2005.

I gotta level with you: not too long ago, I didn’t give a damn about pasta sauce in jars. “Who needs it?” I always thought. If you wanted fast tomato sauce for your pasta at 8:30pm on a weeknight, all you had to do, I reasoned, was open a can of tomatoes, crush them in your hands, add them to a pan where some garlic was sizzling in olive oil, drop in a little basil, and you were good to go. And “good” was the kicker: the simple, from-scratch marinara yielded by this 30-minute process was better than any product you could possibly buy in a jar.

Then the red tide turned. Suddenly, my supermarket shelf, which used to carry two main brands of pasta sauce—Ragu and Prego, the Lords of the Saucy Universe—started displaying new brands, it seemed, every month. The recent arrivals came from famous Italian-American restaurants, or from celebrity chefs (whether they specialized in Italian food or not), or from small regional companies looking to cash in big-time on their theretofore local reputations, or from non-sauce companies deciding the time was ripe to expand their lines into farinaceous-facilitatin’ fluid. And that’s just the supermarket! But now, a trip to any high-end, fancy grocery began revealing even more exotic pastabilities. Today, there must be literally thousands of labels to choose from.

And why should you care? Once again, quality is the point. No, you will not get me to substitute Ragu or Prego for my beloved home-made marinara, no sir, no way, not ever. However, if you look hard enough, there are finally terrific pasta sauces out there in jars, the kinds of sauces that you just can’t make at home, the kinds of sauces that function as time travel back to about 1952 and make you say “That’s it! That’s precisely the kind of Italian-American taste I grew up with and I thought was gone forever!” These high-quality sauces harken back to another exciting tradition as well—the Old Country Italian one, where every mama from San Marzano to Capri would put up tomato sauce in jars to capture and preserve the freshness of the autumn tomato harvest. That kind of excitement is now in our stores. Remember: pasta sauce in jars is not a tradition that began at a bottling plant in Akron, Ohio! This is a food preparation that can be very real, very authentic, with tons of integrity!

I guess it doesn’t hurt my interest one little bit that, in reality, it is quicker to open a jar than to peel and slice garlic, crush the tomatoes, wash the basil, etc. Let’s not quibble about minutes—but I must confess that there are some weekday nights when all I want is something really good really fast. And—f you start to consider the myriad pasta-sauce possibilities out there that go beyond basic tomato, the time-saving advantages of using sauce in jars really kick in.

The most astonishing thing about store bought sauce is the diversity that lies within: though you might expect pasta sauces in jars to start tasting alike, each jar has a distinct, individual character. When I grew good and sick of not knowing which pasta sauces, if any, were worth my attention: it didn’t take long for me to develop some criteria for what I liked and didn’t like. Here are the leading things that, in my palate world, are likely to bring a sauce down:

Bad Pasta Sauce Factors
*The most widespread flaw in American pasta sauces is the dreaded Glop-‘n-Sugar Factor, so often caused in the sauce by the use of corn syrup. Actually, to call this a “flaw” is to under-emphasize its pervasiveness: sweet and gloppy-thick pasta sauce is an American tradition, really and truly “our” style of pasta sauce. But it’s a bad tradition, at least to me. Aside from the fact that sweet-and-gloppy sauce with pasta tastes entirely inauthentic, it just doesn’t taste good. It’s heavy. It weighs pasta down. It defeats the lightness of a pasta dish. It tastes like dessert. Yuck.

*Another quality that turns me off is the Mediocre Canned Tomato Syndrome: sometimes a pasta sauce in a jar can taste like inferior canned tomatoes cobbled together into a sauce, lacking depth and any real tomato interest.

*Sometimes, producers give their inferior tomatoes more interest by resorting to the Salsa Factor, with chopped peppers and other veggies–wherein you the consumer are hard-pressed to tell the difference between your “pasta sauce” and any mediocre “salsa” that sits on a grocery store shelf. Bright, yes…quasi-fresh, yes…but thoroughly insipid as pasta sauce.

*Even worse is the spine-chilling Airplane Vinaigrette Syndrome. I don’t know how else to describe this awful taste. It may come from an excess of bad vinegar, or from Worcestershire sauce, certainly from some misguided effort to “spike” a sauce in a jar.

*Then there’s Dried Herb Mania. Some producers make up for the intrinsic lack of tomato taste in their products by going nuts with the dried green stuff—and, often, in addition to overwhelming herbiness, you get a kind of really unattractive mustiness as well.

*Another off-flavor, to me, is what I call the Chicken Stock Factor. Now, chicken stock is not necessarily a bad thing in a tomato sauce; one of the greatest Italian-American chefs I ever knew (Angelo, of Angelo’s in Brooklyn in the 1950s), used to cut his shrimp marinara with a little chicken stock, and it was delicious. And I’m not even sure that jars with the Chicken Stock Factor actually use chicken stock. But the palate impression they leave is of some odd, chemical, industrial taste that seems more than anything else like the insipidity of a chicken bouillon cube.

*Lastly, there’s the ineffable world of Sauce Gone Wrong—flaws in the sauce obviously not intentional, caused instead by some breakdown in the production and/or storage process. I sampled some sauces that tasted like wet vegetables turning moldy, others that tasted like garlic pickles starting to ferment, others that tasted as dank as corked wine. If you come upon a sauce like this—don’t eat it!

 

Great Pasta Sauce Factors
*For starters, a great pasta sauce has to provide an antidote to the Glop-‘n-Sugar Factor. I love pasta sauces that are loose in texture, often with a runny background holding coarse chunks of tomatoes. My ideal sauce of this kind would be low in sugar (coming, preferably, from the natural sugars in tomatoes only), and with a healthy, sprightly acidity. These are the kinds of sauces that, to me, seem “real.” Italian-Americans have often named these kinds of sauces “marinara”—a world away from thickened tomato purée.

*A crucial factor is the tomato dimension itself: does the sauce have a deep, wild, profound, just-off-the-vine taste of tomatoes?

*One of the things for me that drives a sauce way up the charts is the taste of oil in the sauce. It’s a quality completely lacking in the Glop-‘n-Sugar boys. But when I open a jar and see that olive-oil glisten floating on top, I start getting interested. If the taste of olive oil has penetrated the sauce, I get more interested. And if that penetrating taste of oil has a food-frying quality—if it tastes like garlic was sautéed in it, or eggplant, or breaded veal cutlets—then I go berserk.

*The next factor is difficult to describe, but we can call it the Nostalgia Factor. Every once in a while a sauce, both in texture and flavor, pushes those 1952 buttons for some mysterious reason. Some of the sauces that do this to me reminded me of the simple food I’d eaten long ago at the homes of Italian friends on Sunday afternoons, the quintessential mama cooking, the proverbial all-day pot, often referred to in New York’s boroughs and suburbs as “gravy.” As that nostalgic taste in the jars gets more complex, it starts to remind me of the kinds of sauces I’d inhale at Italian-American restaurants in the 1950s and 1960s. Either way, there’s nothing I’d rather have a jarred sauce do than bring me back to a time when a red-checkered tablecloth was not a cliché, and nobody called garlic bread “bruschetta.”

*Sometimes, simple and correct is what attracts me—particularly in the very basic tomato sauces. Sometimes, however, it is complexity that’s the come-on—as long as the complexity is good and true. Complexity becomes a key factor in the jarred sauces that purport to have more going on in them, through the advertised addition of vegetables, herbs, or other ingredients.

*Another duality (such as simplicity/complexity) concerns cooking time. Some of my favorite sauces in jars obviously reflect hours in the pot, leading to a rich, developed, long-cooked tomato flavor. Other good ones, however, are completely different—with an extremely fresh, short-cooked taste suggestive of fresh tomatoes.

 

Photos: epSos.de/Flickr Creative Commons, BigStockPhoto, muirglen

Related Posts