Ettore Boiardi started Chef Boyardee after patrons in his restaurant began requesting samples of his spaghetti sauce. Today nobody over the age of 6 would rave about the red stuff they sell now. So was the sauce that great years ago, but they’ve changed the recipe, or has it always tasted the same and nobody back then who wasn’t Italian knew what good spaghetti sauce was?
I haven’t eaten Chef Boyardi in nearly 50 years, but as I recall, there were actually two different types. One was the familiar orange-red, sweet sauce we’ve come to know and hate. The other was a dark red “Italian-style” sauce that wasn’t really targeted at kids.
I suspect the latter was closer to what the Chef would have had in his restaurant, although I don’t know how it would stack up against today’s recipes.
That second type is one I’ve never had, but the first type hasn’t changed in taste enough for me to notice in the 60 or so years I have had the joy of eating it when there’s nothing else around. I couldn’t tell you the last time that was!
You could apply the same logic to canned “ethnic” foods of all nationalities: chow mein, tamales, escargot, whatever.
Yeah. If I’m interpreting correctly, it was “good” because it was the only choice. I fixed the Chef’s spaghetti dinner and made the Chef’s pizza because they were the only spaghetti sauces and pizza kits on the shelf. There might have been a spaghetti sauce recipe in the Betty Crocker cookbook, but it probably didn’t taste much different from the one in the can.
My first trimester of pregnancy, all I wanted to eat was Chef Boyardee beef ravioli with the nuclear orange sauce.
Can’t even look at the stuff now.
I was lucky enough to have an Italian grandmother who made real food.
But even as a kid, I would eat Chef Boyardee crap simply because of the marketing and my other friends ate it as well. I agree, it was pretty much the only thing on the market back then, or at least the most common to find in your local supermarket.
I still know people who buy a jar of some tomato sauce and dump it on noodles and think they are culinary geniuses. I guess I have been making my own sauces, from scratch, too long to even consider doing that.
BTW, anyone remember the can of ravioli in red sauce?
I can’t believe I actually liked that when I was a kid, despite having had real home made tortellini from my grandmother! Maybe it was the ketchup sauce - and as a kid, well, that was all you needed to make ANYTHING taste good. This might explain why I rarely use ketchup on anything today - reminds me of that Chef Boyardee experience.
My kids occasionally eat the Chef Boyardee O’s, and I tasted them a while back. Blech! Yet I used to love the ravioli. It seems to me that the sauce is a lot sweeter these days than it was decades ago, but I’ll confess it could be due to the maturation of my palate.
[Shrug] I still eat the ravioli when the opportunity arrives. I also eat corned beef hash though, but only from the red can.
I can’t recall eating that stuff much as a kid, largely because my Italian mother wouldn’t have stood for it.
She would make us turn the crank on the pasta machine starting from about age six on, so having her open a can of that up would have broken her heart.
Still, my mom and grandma never made their own pizza sauce - they always bought the canned sauces from the DelGrosso company and put it on their own dough. This company outdoes the Chef in all respects except volume. Try their products if available near you.
Same here. I like the lasagna, too. It’s definitely not the healthiest stuff in the store, and no one is pretending that it’s actual Italian food (I, too, had an Italian mother and grandmother), but I’m surprised that all of the objections so far have been about the taste!
AS italian food it falls well short, as its own food category, its not bad.
I’m stunned that anyone over the age of twelve likes it. You can make a good approximation of the sauce by dissolving pink cotton candy in warm water and adding a pint of catsup. Add frozen ravioli, heat and stir.
I wouldn’t consider Boyardee “ketchup sauce”. I’ve had real ketchup sauce, the military-style stuff that my dad used to make for spaghetti. The same sort as seen in the first episode of “Band of Brothers”. Boy, was I glad when he switched to pre-made sauce!
They did the same thing to Colonel Sanders and his fried chicken. He perfected the recipe and cooking in his restaurant. From what I’ve read it really was extremely good.
Sanders created the franchise and personally went to each restaurant to train the cooks. That approach wasn’t fast enough for the corporate types & investors behind the company. Sanders was turned into a figurehead spokesman. He wasn’t very well educated and they easily manipulated him. The suits screwed around with the cooking to make it quicker and more efficient. The stuff they sell today is nothing like the KFC I had in the late 1960’s.
If I had a time machine I’d love to visit Sanders restaurant before it became a franchise.
I suspect Chef Boyardee food was changed drastically too.
I suspect you are right.
There used to be boxed Boyardee dinners you could get that were better, but we never got those at home because they included mushroom sauce and my father hated mushrooms.
I remember the standalone canned sauce as always being awful - my mom would dump chunks of unseasoned hamburger into it too since my dad insisted on having meat. Blech. Even as a kid I didn’t like it.
Here’s an ad from 1953 made by the chef himself - touting the boxed dinners:
Actually, I always have a can of Beefaroni in my cupboard. A can of Beefaroni mixed with a good chunk of melted cheddar equals quick no fuss dinner for me that I can eat right out of the saucepan. That with an ice cold glass of milk. Yum!
I can still remember the speeded up action commercial of kids running home while singing:
“We’re havin’ Beefaroneeeeeee…
Beefaroni’s really neat,
Beefaroni can’t be beat,
Hooraayyyyyy for Beefaroneeeeeeee!!!”
It drives me up the wall when people talk about pizza sauce or spaghetti sauce as ketchup.
We all have our pet peeves, I guess.
I wondered the same thing about Chef Boyardee. Tried some ravioli about a year ago and it was bloody terrible. I want to believe the formula has changed, because it’s less comforting to admit that I once loved eating complete shit.
I wanted that stuff so badly when I was a kid (50 years ago), but my mother wouldn’t have it in the house. And then when I finally was able to obtain a can of it, I threw it out after one bite. Same with that Dinty Moore stew crap.
Comfort food.
It’s not great cuisine by any stretch of the word, but when I heat up a can of Chef Boyardee Ravioli, it reminds me of my teen years – it was great after a night out at the bars getting pissed.
As for the boxed spaghetti, my parents would buy it when I was four or five because it was only 29c a box, and cheaper than trying to get all the ingredients to make spaghetti piecemeal.