Ain't Found A Good Title Blog

The search is over.  This is number one.

I’ve never thought much of prepared tomato sauces.  I’ve tried a few and while tolerable, they’re really not that good.  Recently I was fortunate enough to run across a 31 brand comparison of store-bought tomato sauces.  That of course compelled me to try the surprising number one choice, Target’s (of all places) Giada De Laurentiis Vegetable Marinara Pasta Sauce.  As an immediate disclaimer, the fact that Giada is charming and as cute as a button, has absolutely no influence on the rest of this review.

It’s not difficult to see how this was chosen as first among 31.  The sauce is visibly thick with identifiable seeds and fair-sized bits and pieces of other ingredients.  While thick, the sauce is not a chunky sauce.  The ingredient list says the tomatoes are “course ground”.  I suspect they mean, “coarse ground”.   No matter, that’s a good description of the texture.

The taste is a little sweetish, but with many hints of other flavors peeking through.  There’s a strong, but not overpowering, hint of garlic.  That’s important in my book.  I’m still trying to identify the other flavors.  Perhaps it’s the red bell peppers that provide the mystery.

Overall this is an excellent sauce.  It’s very different from my homemade sauce, but equally good in its own way.

I gave the sauce a test in a variation of my baked mostaccioli recipe.  Except for the celery, beef, a small can of whole tomatoes and sugar (all 4 required for the recipe – but not the sauce), I purposely did not add anything to change or enhance the flavors in the sauce.  For this test, the sauce had to stand on its own, bringing all the flavors to the dish.

I brought the mostaccioli over to the relatives along with a couple of other dishes for a little informal Christmas Eve meal.  I got to take home the leftovers from the other two dishes.  The mostaccioli stayed there.  Enough said about how they liked it?

Calories  80 per 1/2 cup (125 g)       Price – around $3.00 on sale

Tags: calories, cooking, food, giada de laurentiis, italian, marinara, price, review, reviews, target, tomato sauce

This entry was posted on 12/27/2011 at 10:00 and is filed under Recipes, food, cooking and related items. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.