While perusing the tomato aisle at the grocery store, we’re all met with jars and cans of diced, pureed, stewed, crushed, peeled and whole tomatoes, as well as tomato sauce. How do you know which is the best to use for your pasta? When we were in Italy, Chiara from Mamma Agata’s, told us that we should taste test our tomatoes to find the sweetest option. You don’t want tomatoes with added sugar, but you do want tomatoes that are picked at the peak of ripeness. We often buy Mutti tomato puree, but we recently decided to blind taste test a few of the options on our grocery shelves. It’s actually a great exercise to taste the difference in acidity and sweetness.
We tested the following tomato brands: Mutti, Pomi, 6 in 1, San Marzano, and Bionature brands of crushed and pureed tomatoes. We assumed that we’d obviously pick the Mutti in the end, but did we? We took our top two tomatoes and tested them even further – side-by-side with our tomato sauce.
Our top picks were these and these tomatoes. They were our absolute favorites! What’s your favorite brand of tomatoes?
Try the best pasta sauce recipe we found in Italy, and use these tips to make your pasta like an authentic Italian. Get all of our favorite pasta recipes here.