Recently I’ve been buying a few cookbooks from the thrift shop. Saves money over getting the new ones, saves second-hand goods from being tossed, and does the job I need in finding recipe ideas.
One of the cookbooks I got is a cookbook on pasta sauces. I’ve been holding off on making pasta until I could portion the servings properly, and I recently just got a portioning tool to help me with that. However, when I wanted to try a recipe from the book, I found surprisingly that the recipes called for fresh tomatoes.
Now, the cookbook is by no means new, seeing how the publication date is 1987. From what I’ve heard, canned tomatoes are actually preferred over fresh, though I can’t recall the reasoning as to why. I was curious about whether culinary knowledge has evolved since the publication of this book where common practice has changed to prefer canned tomatoes over fresh, or if the differences I’ve heard about are unfounded or incorrect.
On top of that, I was curious about other aspects. Would making pasta sauce with fresh tomatoes (namely Roma tomatoes) be cheaper than using canned? Also, since I’m trying to be more environmentally conscious, would canned tomatoes have a higher carbon footprint than fresh, or would the differences be negligible?
Thanks in advance! I likely won’t be able to respond to comments right away, but I do appreciate any and all help.
Good quality canned is generally preferred.
You can make tomato sauce from fresh tomatoes, but it is a serious time investment, and you will, at best, end up with the same product quality as canned.
Here’s Alton Brown’s recipe for tomato sauce from fresh tomatoes:
https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/tomato-sauce-recipe-1912571
It’s difficult to find quality, properly vine-ripened tomatoes. They have such a short shelf life and ship poorly when ripe, so almost everywhere that produces them picks them green and ships them to markets. They hit them with a little ethylene and bam, bright-red, blemish-free, bland, semi-unripe tomatoes. But places that produce canned tomatoes can pull them right when they’re perfect, skin them, seed them, cook and mill them and store them away.
If you can find a local farm with quality vine-ripened tomatoes, you still need to seed them, roast them, skin them, and mill them. You just want the flesh, and you want it to be cooked and smashed to death.
And for consistency, a good can of San Marzano will be the same every time.
Price Comparison depends on what you have access to and what season it is. If you buy local farm-grown tomatoes in bulk, you can probably make it somewhat cheaper. If you’re just buying them from the grocer and they’re out of season, you won’t be able to touch the quality for the price.
Carbon FP is an interesting take. They’ll spend less energy per tomato doing them in huge batches. But you’re not going to can them, But the cans are recyclable, but recycling uses electricity. Presumably, you’re going to get them hyper-locally, but the added shipping cost to send the few you’re using to market is marginal. I’d say it’s almost, but not quite a wash with it being a little better locally. You’d also be supporting local farms which is good for everyone. Of course, this also means you need to be getting them in growing season so they aren’t getting shipped up from equatorial countries.
TL;DR
It’s probably not noticeably cheaper, or higher quality than good quality canned, but that’s no reason not to do it.
IMO doing a correct tomato sauce (yes it’s quite time consuming and you should take extra care of how you do the onions, again IMO) it’s wildly better.
Fun tip, undercook your pasta and finish cooking them in the tomato sauce!
I’m wondering how people do their sauce if canned is even equal in taste but well 🤷🏼♀️
Energy wise your stove is probably not as energy efficient either - the stove itself might be, but large batches mean a better volume to surface area ratio and they have some incentive to look at the energy usage as it is a large cost so they may be finding other ways to control energy.