Recently I’ve been buying a few cookbooks from the thrift shop. Saves money over getting the new ones, saves second-hand goods from being tossed, and does the job I need in finding recipe ideas.
One of the cookbooks I got is a cookbook on pasta sauces. I’ve been holding off on making pasta until I could portion the servings properly, and I recently just got a portioning tool to help me with that. However, when I wanted to try a recipe from the book, I found surprisingly that the recipes called for fresh tomatoes.
Now, the cookbook is by no means new, seeing how the publication date is 1987. From what I’ve heard, canned tomatoes are actually preferred over fresh, though I can’t recall the reasoning as to why. I was curious about whether culinary knowledge has evolved since the publication of this book where common practice has changed to prefer canned tomatoes over fresh, or if the differences I’ve heard about are unfounded or incorrect.
On top of that, I was curious about other aspects. Would making pasta sauce with fresh tomatoes (namely Roma tomatoes) be cheaper than using canned? Also, since I’m trying to be more environmentally conscious, would canned tomatoes have a higher carbon footprint than fresh, or would the differences be negligible?
Thanks in advance! I likely won’t be able to respond to comments right away, but I do appreciate any and all help.
Fresh tomatoes are so much better, it’s like a different food entity but it’s a pain to process them. A tomato mill helps a lot with that but it crushes the tomatoes so if you want chunky sauce it’s not ideal. What I often do is mill 3/4 of the tomatoes and then hand seed the rest and that seems to work pretty well.
Fresh tomatoes from a garden, or if you have a good local farmer slinging heirloom tomatoes are the best.
Canned tomatoes are really close to this, and being shelf stable are pretty incredible because you can make delicious sauces any time.
The “fresh” tomatoes that look like what you get on a burger at a fast food joint, or the Roma tomatoes that come sliced into wedges on that side salad at the diner you have literally never seen anyone eat are infinitely worse than canned tomatoes and honestly should be banned from using the word “tomatoes”
Feels like those ones should be forced to market themselves as “tumatos” or “tomato-like fruit”