For some reason my homemade pasta sauce is never as good as the stuff in jars. Never. I tried for years to get it right, then one day in an emergency used a jar of Prego or some such. My husband said, “Hey, this is really good. You should use this recipe all the time.” So I do.
Agree on the mashed potatoes. Fresh made is better, but if you’ve got a hungry family, just got in the door, the instant is a worthwhile alternative.
Also agree on the plastic-wrapped baking potatoes. You have to remove the plastic before baking anyway. Right next to them are the same thing but not wrapped, if you don’t want to buy a whole 5-lb bag.
I read an interesting article, though, on people with really tight budgets, as in you only get $X on a weekly basis. You never have enough money at one time to buy in quantity, so you end up paying more in the long run but you don’t have any other option.
The flaw in most food testing is that it’s based on one sip, or one bite, of a product. That’s one of the dirty secrets of things like Coke-v-Pepsi tests; what people like in a first sip is not what they necessarily like in a whole bottle. Everything is geared to that first and only blitzkrieg on the tastebuds. Hence the prevalence of salt and sugars, which may be generally indetectible in the overall flavor but do their hot little tap-dance on your tastebuds.
I think more people are knowledgeable about the inner workings of the CIA than about the way the food industry works.
That must be part of it. There’s also certain pizzas I don’t like because of their extra-sweet sauce–I just call them “sugar sauces.” I never add sugar to my homemade sauce. I know tomatoes vary in acidity, but I tend to like things on the tart side, and I never noticed any tomatoes to be that acidic that I needed sugar to balance it.
Like I really dislike the jarred sauces. I’d rather have pasta with a can of decent crushed tomatoes on them than a jar of Ragu or Prego. I’m not trying to be snobby here–I just don’t like that flavor. I’ll eat it, but I’d never buy it myself.
If you read the article link they go a lot more in depth than that. I’m guessing maybe for “food challenges” or “taste offs” they may do what you say, but I’m not talking about Coke-vs-Pepsi type situations designed for advertising purposes. I’m talking about the internal testing the major processed foods companies go through to develop the most competitive products.
They obviously work, it was such testing that produced Prego and it immediately became a billion-dollar line for the company that made it. So it would appear that enough people want these sugar-optimized sauces that it’s extremely profitable to produce them. If they only liked the first taste of Prego and not the whole bottle, it wouldn’t last very long as a brand.
The full article is an interesting read, because it really highlights how the receptors the food processors work so hard to maximize create addictive mindsets for food that is really quite bad for people (high sodium / high sugar foods.)
I was thinking the same thing. The peel adds flavor, texture, and fiber. It takes one minute to cut up the spud, 30 seconds to put it and some water in a pan (who brings the water to a boil and THEN puts in the potato? Madness!), and 20 minutes to cook.
Out of curiosity, have you looked at the ingredients lately? They’re pretty unexciting, to say the least. None of the common brands that I could find (Prego, Ragu, Classico, Barilla) ingredient lists for or label photos had HFCS, or even anything out of the very ordinary.
It’s totally a convenience thing; not everyone necessarily likes a relatively fresh sauce, and neither do they want to spend the time cooking it down to the right consistency.
I can understand that- while cooking is a hobby of mine, I can totally see single people or couples not wanting to go get all the ingredients, do the prep, and make a pot of sauce and then having to store what they don’t eat that night.
It’s often a whole lot easier to just buy a jar of sauce and either eat it as-is, or doctor it with meat and herbs to your taste (what my wife and I do more often than not).
I will admit that I haven’t ever understood the real utility of things like “Realemon” or those funky little lemon or lime juice containers shaped like lemons or limes. Fresh citrus is both available, cheap and generally tastes considerably better than the bottled stuff, and it’s just really not that hard to juice a lemon or lime, considering that most recipes call for less than an oz of lemon or lime juice, which is roughly one lemon or lime worth.
Actually, I love the little lemon/lime squeezers. Not for recipes that require juice, but to add a little squirt to a glass of icewater, gives it just enough bite to make it interesting without adding lots of sugar.
Sure, if you regularly keep fresh lemons or limes on hand or remember to buy them. But occasionally, I need lemon juice for a recipe but don’t have a fresh lemon. In such cases, it’s useful to have a bottle of lemon juice in the refrigerator.
The thing is that on a per serving basis, the homemade is certainly cheaper. However, if you’re cooking for 1 or even 2 people, you often have to buy way more than you need to make the serving. So if you can’t use the rest of the ingredient in question or don’t want it, then it feels wasteful and jacks the total cost up.
This applies to fruit - a whole watermelon/cantelope/whatever is a ton of fruit, I couldn’t eat it in time. But one of those pre-cut packs is just right. Some veggies are this way - like squash or celery. Herbs. Salad greens, if I want more than one type, I will buy the pre-bagged mix. Otherwise, I can buy one head of green leaf lettuce, but no arugula or other greens mixed in. Etc.
One thing I don’t get is pre-peeled onions. I chop onions myself, but I understand the convenience of pre-cut. However, peeling an onion takes two seconds. You buy the pre-peeled one and you still need to slice/chop/dice it, so where’s the advantage?
Not if you’re me, and you want to get ONLY the papery stuff off the onion. Yeah, I know, if you take off the first layer of actual onion, it peels in two seconds. But I was raised by depression-era parents, and every time I peel an onion the quick way I feel like my Gram is gonna come slap me on the head for wasting so much.
I finally got to the point just in the past few years that I throw out the mushy icky veggies and meat pulp left over from making stock. My mother still scolds me for doing that, too.
Chopping garlic is a pain (and it takes much longer than the 30 secs someone mentioned to even just get peeled so you can start chopping) and the jarred stuff does not taste bad at all. But I don’t even bother with that usually, most of the time I use the dried minced or even garlic powder. Oh noes!
I’ll use garlic powder, but it’s got a bit of a different flavor. Depending on the dish, I may used both garlic powder (as part of a spice mix) and fresh garlic. But I really don’t understand the jarred stuff.
Maybe I do it wrong but I break however many cloves I need off the bulb and use a knife to slice off each end of the clove and the outer covering just peels away. It’s literally 10 seconds per clove, if that.
At our house, it’s not an issue of cooking time. We only eat potatoes once a month or so (we’re more of a rice family) and thus we don’t keep potatoes around at all times. So the choice for us is between running out to the store, buying a few potatoes, coming home and cooking them or just whipping up some instant mashed potatoes from a stockpile that lasts more-or-less indefinitely in powder form.
However, I meant tomato sauce, the stuff in cans, which is not the same thing as premade pasta sauce. Tomato sauce and tomato paste have tons of crap in them. Use fresh-canned tomato forms instead of this precooked glop.