If you’re referring to Rao’s, it’s certainly not hard to find in Canada. I’m in Ontario and I see it everywhere. But as I said, I don’t particularly like it. It’s OK, but only just OK – nothing special, IMHO. I wouldn’t mind the premium price, but for that I can get much better sauces.
BTW, I’ve known several folks who have made really excellent pasta sauce at home, from scratch. I know it can be done but, alas, my own attempts have fallen far short of my standards!
Costco and Pusateri’s isn’t everywhere.
By “everywhere” I mean that I see it in most grocery stores, not just Costco and Pusateri’s.
Because of this thread, I picked up some Rao’s last weekend at CostCo and made it last night. I add Italian sausage and mushrooms to my jarred sauces.
I have to say, I prefer Silver Palate Tomato Basil sauce.
By idiots, I expect they meant “greedy, bottom-line only focused capitalists,” who will, for one example, change higher quality ingredients to cheaper ones to increase profit, even if it reduces the quality of the product.
I wonder if we have different expectations for pasta sauce. Rao’s is by far the closest to homemade that I’ve had, so much so that it can be mistaken for such, but there’s a lot of folks who don’t like that straightforward Italian profile and want more … stuff in their pasta sauce. Like, for me, a can of San Marzanos or similar, garlic, olive oil, and salt (add dried oregano or finish with fresh basil if you want) makes a better pasta sauce than 99% of commercial pasta sauces.
So not idiots then. Assholes arguably but not people lacking in intelligence.
I just read some history. Rao’s started as a restaurant that opened in 1896 and stayed in the family for four generations. They didn’t start selling their sauce separately until the 1990s. Over the decades they expanded their side business with more sauces and added soups. The family decided to cash out. This was a choice and wasn’t done out of desperation or coercion.
Who is the idiot?
I’m kind of wondering what’s different about Rao’s in terms of ingredients or manufacturing, that it would be as much better as it is, and why nobody else really comes close?
The ingredients aren’t spectacular and it’s jarred/canned, so I’m a bit perplexed. I feel like it can’t be the recipe- with as simple of an ingredient list as it has, someone would copy it and sell it cheaper if they could. So it’s probably somewhere in the ballpark of “low ideal shelf life” or “specific, expensive ingredients” that aren’t called out on the label as such. Like specific tomatoes, etc…
Any ideas?
Like a lot of things, the drive for profit growth overwhelms any wholesome intentions of maintaining traditions. This is pretty much inevitable when a founder or small private team (like a family) finds success and turns over control to a larger entity. The Colonel is a well-known example.
I suspect this is highly likely to be the case. Better quality tomatoes and olive oil, hence the higher price. As I said above there are canned tomatoes and then there are canned tomatoes. There is a marked difference in quality between the low and the high end for both of those products. Rao is now a mass market brand rather than a boutique brand and as such they probably not skimming the very tippy-top of ingredients. But they have obviously retained some real quality control.
Their website says Italian tomatoes (no tomato paste) and Italian olive oil.
We probably do have somewhat different tastes in pasta sauce, but my preference has nothing to do with “more stuff”. Both of my favourite sauces that I mentioned earlier (post #22) stress simplicity. The ingredients list for Stefano Marinara is almost identical to yours with the addition of onions (Italian whole peeled tomatoes, crushed tomatoes, extra virgin olive oil, garlic, onions, sea salt, and herbs) although that one word “herbs” may be doing some heavy lifting.
As I recall, Pusateri’s Semplice sauce is also very basic, but it’s deliciously mellow, which is an attribute that I love. I don’t have the ingredients list at the moment but I do remember that it’s similar to the above. I also remember – because it seemed so odd – that it contains carrots. It turns out that carrots are frequently added to pasta sauce because their natural sugars help to balance the acidity of the tomatoes, and this may be part of the reason I find this particular sauce so mellow.
I guess the moral of the story is that there’s no such thing as a single authentic Italian marinara, and the many variations cater to slightly different tastes.
Speaking of different tastes, I once tried Truff brand black truffle spicy marinara, which some reviews raved about and which costs more than twice as much as Rao. I didn’t like it at all. IMO neither truffle nor hot spice has any place in a pasta sauce.
Yeah, carrots are not weird at all. No meat sauce I make, pretty much, is without them. It’s a standard part of the battuto that is the Italian version of a mirepoix. Onions, carrots, celery and sometimes other stuff. But even in a normal tomato sauce it can be used, and carrots alone mellow out the sauce, as you note, instead of using sugar.
I agree that in a jarred sauce truffles are likely too much. I’ve had Truff’s hot sauce, and it was limited in its uses (though I really liked it on eggs and with potato-ey stuff). On pasta, grated truffles at the table are fantastic with certain dishes. Like orgasmically so. But I can’t imagine it preserving well in a sauce. Spicy, though, yeah, we’re gonna disagree on that. My two favorite simple sauces are arrabiata and puttanesca, both which contain a hit of spice. Nothing too crazy, but definitely they hit.
That one is indeed just personal preference. I love hot foods in the right context – to me a curry dish is useless if it’s not hot enough to have you break out into a sweat and desperately reach for more mango chutney! But it’s not what I look for in a pasta sauce.
As for truffles, I would probably enjoy grated truffle on pasta. I’ve never had it, but one of my favourite accompaniments for spaghetti is small whole cremini mushrooms stir-fried in garlic butter and arranged around the circumference of the plate.
Rao’s sauce may be more like the Italian ethos of using simple quality ingredients. But they don’t sell Bolognese and fresh is usually better. Except for canned tomaters.
Rao’s does sell bolognese. Or am I misunderstanding your sentence? (I’ve never tried it. That’s one sauce/ragu I especially like making myself. Jarred versions are usually far too liquidy. It’s not so much a meat sauce as saucy meat.)
In Canada, Rao’s is a newcomer. Expensive at $7-14 a bottle. Usually they only sell marinara here, but I have very occasionally seen vodka and tomato basil. I haven’t seen other flavours, frozen goods or noodles here.
But even if they sold bolognese, no way it’s as good as fresh. Or mine (with fresh meat). I’m not saying commercial sauces don’t have their place, and sometimes use them on homemade pizza. Mentioning that, I might have seen Rao’s pizza sauce at Costco too. They sold San Marzano tomatoes as well, which is much more important to me than seeing Rao’s. Then they replaced those with peeled Mutti for many months (which are about as good). Now they have brought back San Marzano, but doubled the price (three instead of six 28 ounce cans). Neither were fire roasted, which is what Rao’s recommends in their best cookbooks, but which is unusual to see in Canada.
So just out of curiosity I researched the top 10 selling pasta sauces by sales volume in the US and searched for marinara ingredients. Progresso makes the top 10, but they do stuff like canned clam sauces, not marinara. “Store brand” was also in the top 10, which I didn’t include for obvious reasons. Ingredients:
Ragu.
Obviously there a metric ton of jarred sauces out there, including many imports and boutique brands with better quality ingredients. It’s a pretty large market, convenience being king. But I am struck by the commonalities in the ingredient lists of the big sellers vs. Rao. Easy to see why they have consistently won taste tests.
Perhaps, but it is still my favorite of their sauces. Not “liquidy” at all. Very thick, with an amazing flavor from beef, pork and pancetta.
The Rao’s pasta sauce mystique depends heavily on it being made in Italy from Genuine Italian-Grown San Marzano Tomatoes, so it was jarring (sorry) to see a news article from two years ago (unfortunately paywalled) about Rao’s bringing its pasta sauce-making back to the U.S. to a Colorado factory. 
As for the San Marzanos, they are typically described as mild and low-acid, which to me translates to less flavorful. San Marzano and Roma tomatoes are commonly used to make sauce, but if I was growing tomatoes to use in sauce I’d choose other varieties which are better-tasting, including certain heirloom varieties. What you’re after is a thick meaty tomato with good balance of sweetness and acidity and relatively few seeds.
