If you have first hand experience of anyone who is serving up in the restaurant the same stuff coming out of (e.g,) Conagra’s production line and going into the supermarket shelf/chiller/freezer, then I am happy to have my ignorance fought. But I’ve never experienced that.
Maybe coffee shops like Dunkin and Starbucks might be serving up brewed coffee from the identical beans they sell under their name in the grocery stores. And perhaps Olive Garden salad dressing is the same in the store as in the restaurant (just in different sizes/containers/labels)
But I don’t think anyone is serving up lasagna or steak & potatoes out of the same frozen product as you can buy in the stores with the restaurant brand names.
How much do you really think Panera, P.F. Chang, and TGIF are concerned about the quality of the food they serve in their restaurants? They’re even less concerned about the quality of the food that they license their name to.
I’m probably thread-shitting here but… potato soup? Potato, onion, milk, salt and pepper. Dill and sour cream if that’s your thing. I can fuck up something as simple as French toast nine times out of ten, but I have never made a bad pot of potato soup.
I can make all sorts of things. But even simple recipes take more time to do the right way than it takes to just open up a can and heat it, and with just one person eating, it often doesn’t seem like it’s worth the effort.
Eh, I generally have 1-2 cans of Campbell or Progresso clam chowder in the pantry for those periodic Colorado winter days where I shoveled a foot of snow out of the driveway since work is lucky to give ONE snow day a year, and even if it’s -that- day I’ll need to drive the next. Sometimes you just want something hot, fast, and low work that’ll warm you through on such a day.
I do not pretend it’s great, and I absolutely thin it out with some milk (it’s already damn watery due to cheapness) and add herbs and spices to fix it. But that’s about once or twice a year.jj
I fully acknowledge it’s crap, but occasionally it’s useful crap.
There are absolutely good convenience brands. A busy mom with 3 under 5 must have them.
Working people who work long hours. Fast food can just get old.
A decent bean burrito from the freezer with splooging up can be a godsend. Nothing better than a Banquet potpie, occasionally.
I know you can make a magnificent one. Lotsa chopping and prep tho’. Time is needed.
Canned goods are what our forebearers wanted. (For many reasons) That’s why they canned them.
Home canned tomatoes are not nearly as good as fresh off the vine. But they’re serviceable and provide a convenience and a way to have what you might not have access to, otherwise. Factory canned can suffice, easily.
I’m not a-scared to use store bought. If it’s needed.
Other people must feel the same way. Lots of them are sold. The can goods aisle in a store is always full of folks buying.
Oh, you know what my favorite thing in a can is? Corned Beef hash. Hormel. Best human dog food ever!!
I didn’t have much in the way of strong cravings while I was pregnant, but I did have a more-than-usual desire for tomato soup. Campbell’s did nicely. I still kinda like it, maybe because I remember how good it tasted to me then. So yeah - a variation on what you said.
I think a big part of the problem isn’t so much the Campbell’s recipe as the fact that commercially grown mass-market tomatoes have themselves become relatively flavourless. Blame genetic engineering for creating tomatoes that are more amenable to mass-farming goals by producing larger yields, improved pest resistance, and a longer shelf life – even if the resultant product does taste like cardboard. One can still get good-tasting tomatoes, but now they’re more of an upscale luxury item, and those are not the ones that Campbell’s gets delivered to their plants by the boxcar load.
I recently had the worst canned soup ever. I actually laughed out loud while eating it. And it wasn’t Progresso or Campbell’s.
Remember LaChoy? The people who once made Chinese food “swing” American? My mom used to occasionally buy two cans of their shite that she heated and mixed together and it was sad and bland. But we were kids and ate what she made.
I was in a Dollar General and saw LaChoy Hot & Sour soup in a can. I pictured the delicious, thick, tasty soup the local Chinese restaurant offered, but in a can, so I bought it for lunch.
Damn, it was awful! It wasn’t hot, wasn’t sour, just a flavorless watery broth with three or four little pieces of cardboard-tasting stuff in it. Served to me blindly I’d have never guessed it to be hot & sour soup.
If there’s a worse label in the US than LaChoy, I’ve never witnessed it.
I keep a few cans of soup on hand at any given time, usually cream of ______ to use as components in other things when I’m feeling lazy. I’ve had something with bacon in the back of the pantry for a couple of years because I bought two of them and the first was absolutely disgusting. I think it was malodorous with way too much fake smoke.
I did buy some Rao’s on bogo as a result of a thread here and their tomato soup was pretty tasty.
Probably! Canned soups are about convenience, and soup is in the “easy but not particularly quick” category of homemade dishes.
I’ve worked in restaurants that weren’t chains that pretty much served the equivalent of Stouffer’s (maybe it was Sysco) lasagna. So I’d be very surprised if the quality of the low-mid tier chain food was any better than most frozen dinners.
On occasion, we get Panera bread bowls from Harris Teeter – those might well be the same thing used in the restaurants. The fact that the sourdough still needs a little baking time at home helps.
True – see my earlier post above – except that it isn’t specifically GMO’s that are the problem. The same results can be achieved with conventional breeding, and often have been. I’m not even sure if there are GMO tomatoes currently on the market, though it’s very common with corn and soybeans and canola.
This is (comparatively) fresh in a plastic container in the refrigerated deli section of the grocery store, but it is by far the best ready-made tomato soup I’ve found: Blount Fine Food’s Tomato Bisque.
Creamy, rich taste, satisfyingly filling, worth hunting for if your local grocery chain carries it. It’s made in Massachusetts and I don’t know how far from there it’s distributed.
Blount makes other prepared soups, like potato (tried it, also good), lasagna, and others. Under their Clam Shack label they offer clam chowder (Panera’s is better) and lobster bisque (excellent).
Granted, deli-bought soup doesn’t have the shelf life of canned and costs more, but Blount’s is well worth it.
This one I can guarantee is not identical. The ingredients for fresh dough and par baked bread are different. The restaurant version is baked from fresh dough (i.e. never frozen) I believe and have a shelf life of one day. The store bought bread bowls have a shelf life of a couple of weeks at least.
Blount makes Panera’s supermarket soups, I believe. Which is not to say that Blount’s brand and Panera’s will be identical. The specs may be different even for the “same” product (e.g. Tomato Bisque).
Regarding tomato flavor, I never buy full-size tomatoes at the supermarket as I assume they are generally pretty bad. If I want fresh tomatoes and don’t have a home garden/farmers’ market option, I get grape tomatoes (the ones that are almost cherry tomatoes, but more elongated) at the grocery store. I’ve read that they tend to be more flavorful; I generally find them satisfactory.
Also on tomatoes: I went to a cooking workshop led by a Four Seasons chef who said not to peel your tomatoes; you need the color imparted by the skin. He liked to make a tomato base for soup/sauce/cream by sweating tomatoes in a little olive oil with some carrots and onion, then pureeing. I’ve used that technique a lot since I learned it from him.
