Saucy about Sauce
Something I have grown very irrational about lately is tomato sauce. You know, the kind you buy in a jar and dump on top of spaghetti, which you do because you get to feel accomplished for cooking dinner yourself.
I'm pretty sure this started when I stopped shopping for groceries at Aldi. For those not in the know about Aldi, I have to tell you about Aldi. They have really great prices on groceries, with the caveats that you have to bring your own bags, and you "rent" a shopping cart for a quarter (which you then get back at the end). Most importantly, Aldi doesn't carry a selection of brands. Spotting a recognizable brand at Aldi is a rarity. Usually, you'll get what is basically the off-brand version of an already off-brand product; if you're really lucky, they might have a slightly nicer off-brand for a little extra.
The reason I have to point this out is because, for a period of about five years, I only had access to two types of jarred tomato sauce. One cost about 89 cents, and was basically tomato-flavored sugar water. This stuff was so cheap that they eventually gave up the pretense of selling it in glass jars and switched the material to a plastic so cloudy you had no idea you were buying what was, essentially, a bisque gone wrong.
The second type of sauce cost a dollar more, and it was better than it had any right to be. Nowhere near as sweet, and it had actual chunks of tomato. It's what I imagined tomato sauce would be like if I wasn't buying it at Aldi.
Nowadays, after finding myself with slightly more money and slightly less time to make the trek to my nearest Aldi, I go to my regional chain store. And boy, do they have options. They have so many options that I haven't bought the same tomato sauce twice in the past six months. Not because I'm interested in trying them all; far from it. In fact, I'd really rather just be the guy who has nothing to say about tomato sauce because I only eat one kind. I just can't figure out what kind that is.
Half of my problem is, you have to decide what "tier" of sauce you want. I've noticed that tomato sauce comes in two tiers. The first tier is the stuff everybody's heard of; your Ragu, Prego, and so on. This stuff might run about $2.50 to $3.50 a jar, which means I will automatically discount it as mass-produced swill and I won't buy it. This is, of course, an exaggeration; I'll usually settle on something like Newman's Own or Bertolli, which sit towards the higher end of this category, but I won't be happy about it (although Bertolli has a great vodka sauce).
(As an aside, can somebody explain to me why the hell my store doesn't carry Classico anymore? That was the only brand I actually cared for, and now it's completely vanished.)
None of this would be a problem if it wasn't for the existence of the second tier, which must be high-end, small-batch sauces or something, because these things start at $7 a jar, and frequently go up as high as $12. Just by the nature of their existence, I am convinced that the $3 tier of sauces are somehow inferior products. Like believing that Budweiser is a bad beer because we have a wide selection of craft brews available to us now.
The worst offender here seems to be Rao's, which offers a lot of variety and must be pretty popular; but at $10-$12 a jar, I can't imagine who in my backwoods town is rich enough to buy the damn stuff.
(Except for me; one week I was feeling particularly 1% and bought two jars of Rao's when it was on sale for $7-$8 each. My review: probably the best jarred sauce I've ever had, but not to the extent that it justifies the price point, and it definitely did not hold up in leftovers the next day. Other Rao's offerings I've tried: their pasta, which is actually good and reasonably-priced; and their frozen pizza, which wasn't bad, but was laughably lacking in sauce. Though I guess I would be stingy about how much sauce I put on the pizza if I could bottle it and sell it for $12 instead.)
(Also, Rao's sauce didn't have any tomato chunks either. For that price, I really ought to be feeling like I'm not buying a tomato paste puree. Am I just the only person who wants texture with their sauce? I know my wife picks out her tomato bits, but I'm willing to be the weird one.)
So ultimately, what I want is a sauce at a price point of perhaps $4.50 to $5 a jar. This doesn't sound ridiculous, right? Get me a sauce that's a higher caliber than Ragu, but that doesn't make me sob uncontrollably on my way to the cash register. I think there would be some market for this. But if you've been following along, you'll have noticed that they don't even make sauce in the $4 to $6 range, so I guess the corporate bean counters know something I don't. And even if they did put out a sauce in this sweet spot, I'm sure they'd still muck it up by not putting enough bits of tomato in it.
I guess all this to say I'm switching to alfredo.