Weekend Cooking: Pasta Sauces

To all of my east coast friends, I hope you are all doing well.  The news has been devastating and we're all  thinking about you (and donating to help where we can).  My thoughts and prayers go out to you as the clean up and recovery begins.

What can I say about this side of things?  End of term about killed me last week and weekend, so this week I think I spent it trying to gather strength and energy again.  I'm not sure what was up with that first term, but I was so burned out that I couldn't get enough sleep or rest enough to feel back to normal.  What's up with that?  Things are looking up though with a nice weekend relaxing and NO grading in sight.  I'm feeling a bit more back to myself.

For Weekend Cooking this week, I decided to do a little product comparison.  Have you ever looked at the expensive bottled spaghetti sauces and wondered if they're really worth all that extra cost?  Sometimes these sauces are over twice as much as the spaghetti sauces we're all familiar with!  Well, I purchased a couple of bottles of sauces I hadn't yet tried:  Mario Batali's Tomato Basil and Rao's Tomato Basil.  In my local grocery store, these sauces run about $7.99 a bottle.

Now, I usually just make my own sauce from my home canned tomatoes because I have a bit of a sensitivity to acidic tomatoes (supposedly, I'm allergic to them?), but I do fine if the product is high quality and canned when it's fully ripe.  Anyway, I thought I'd try out these sauces for those last minute dinners or baked pasta dish I want to whip up.   Here are my results.

Mario Batali's Tomato Basil

• Flavor:  Very light and slightly tangy back taste.
• Color:  Also, very light, which might mean the tomatoes have been thinned out or canned before fully ripe?
• Basil-ness:  That basil flavor is pretty light.  In fact, it seems to be a bit thinned out.
• Toothiness Quotient:  When applied to the pasta, it sticks nicely and has more of a fresh tomato flavor to it that makes the pasta taste a bit like a cheaper brand.

Rao's Tomato Basil

•  Flavor:  Nice a deep, robust flavor.  This literally tastes like it's been cooking on your stove all day, developing a richness that doesn't taste like it could be bottled.
• Color:  Even from the picture above, you can see that it's a beautiful, dark color.  It's a glorious dark red, with bits of basil and parsley leaves (obviously fresh) throughout.
• Basil-ness:  It was a perfect balance.  The sauce was so rich that the basil was more of a compliment than anything.  
• Toothiness Quotient:  When I tried it out on penne, it coated it delightfully, so spaghetti turned out even better.

My favorite sauce then?  As you can guess, it was Rao's by a landslide.  In fact, when I returned to the grocery store, they had it on sale and I bought four bottles to put on my shelves!  I've tried other expensive brands, but nothing has compared yet to Rao's.  If you look, others have also evaluated bottle sauces and agree with me.  Here's Cooking Light's taste test. 

If you're a bit cheap when it comes to sauces, which I've been since college, I have to at least say you should bite the bullet and try Rao's.  I'll be keeping this sauce around for quick dinner emergencies or a nice baked pasta. 

Weekend Cooking is a great, weekly post run by Beth Fish Reads.  There are some really great food-related posts there.  Stop by to check out other great posts from this weekend.