NailBat
Well-Known Member
In the recent spaghetti sauce thread, the topic of canned tomatoes came up, and I think that's worthy of its own discussion.
I think everyone would agree that if you're able to use in-season tomatoes, you should. But tomatoes are only in season for a few months of the year, if you can get them at all. So for the rest of the year, canned tomatoes are the way to go.
You'll hear time and time again, "Use San Marzano tomatoes!". I say that too. However, if you do some research, you'll find not everyone is convinced, and even the DOP Certified San Marzano tomatoes often fare poorly in taste tests. Personally, I don't believe in taste tests. Asking a focus group to tell me what tomatoes are best is like asking a focus group to tell me what kind of music I should listen to. There's way too many factors for me to trust anything but my own opinion.
What I've personally found is that imported San Marzano tomatoes are reliable. I have never come across a brand of SM tomatoes that was not high quality. Meanwhile, other brands are all over the place. Some are great, some are awful. However even for the good tasting (and often taste test winning) non-SM varieties, there is one thing that ruins them for me: calcium chloride. This is added to canned tomatoes to make them more firm, but it utterly ruins the texture for me. If you read the label on your canned tomato, you'll find this pesky chemical is almost everywhere: except the San Marzanos. While you're reading that label, you'll also find tons of sodium in a lot of brands too, while the San Marzano brands tend to be very low.
Where I do go against the grain though, is that I don't think a DOP certification is absolutely essential. The certification process is lengthy and expensive and not all brands will want to go through the process. I remember a long time ago, the Cento brand was fully DOP certified. Then they stopped, and the reason is they didn't want to pay all the costs associated with certification. Sure, that could, in theory, mean the quality could slip. However I think the brand is still just as good today.
A totally different option than canned tomatoes is passata, which you'll often find in glass jars instead of cans. I like the Mutti brand, which is good because it's pretty much all I can find. Passata is not a direct replacement for canned whole peeled tomatoes, but when I just need a tomato element as part of a larger whole, I'll often reach for this stuff. It's definitely much better than most other things you'll see marketed as "Tomato Puree" or "Tomato Sauce".
I think everyone would agree that if you're able to use in-season tomatoes, you should. But tomatoes are only in season for a few months of the year, if you can get them at all. So for the rest of the year, canned tomatoes are the way to go.
You'll hear time and time again, "Use San Marzano tomatoes!". I say that too. However, if you do some research, you'll find not everyone is convinced, and even the DOP Certified San Marzano tomatoes often fare poorly in taste tests. Personally, I don't believe in taste tests. Asking a focus group to tell me what tomatoes are best is like asking a focus group to tell me what kind of music I should listen to. There's way too many factors for me to trust anything but my own opinion.
What I've personally found is that imported San Marzano tomatoes are reliable. I have never come across a brand of SM tomatoes that was not high quality. Meanwhile, other brands are all over the place. Some are great, some are awful. However even for the good tasting (and often taste test winning) non-SM varieties, there is one thing that ruins them for me: calcium chloride. This is added to canned tomatoes to make them more firm, but it utterly ruins the texture for me. If you read the label on your canned tomato, you'll find this pesky chemical is almost everywhere: except the San Marzanos. While you're reading that label, you'll also find tons of sodium in a lot of brands too, while the San Marzano brands tend to be very low.
Where I do go against the grain though, is that I don't think a DOP certification is absolutely essential. The certification process is lengthy and expensive and not all brands will want to go through the process. I remember a long time ago, the Cento brand was fully DOP certified. Then they stopped, and the reason is they didn't want to pay all the costs associated with certification. Sure, that could, in theory, mean the quality could slip. However I think the brand is still just as good today.
A totally different option than canned tomatoes is passata, which you'll often find in glass jars instead of cans. I like the Mutti brand, which is good because it's pretty much all I can find. Passata is not a direct replacement for canned whole peeled tomatoes, but when I just need a tomato element as part of a larger whole, I'll often reach for this stuff. It's definitely much better than most other things you'll see marketed as "Tomato Puree" or "Tomato Sauce".