I Guess This Blog Is Just Me Ranting About Sauce Now
Okay, I take back what I said last time. I'm not an idiot. I mean, I'll grant you that I'm a dumbass American who is clueless to the fundamentals of tomato-based sauces, but I'm making the claim that it's not my fault.
Let me back up a step. The catalyst of my last mini-post—in which I avowed that it was marinara I was seeking for my spaghetti, and not tomato sauce—was my discovery of Belletieri's. This is a somewhat local brand which only produces, from what I can tell by what is available at my grocery store, a tomato sauce and a marinara. I tried the marinara first, and in it, I finally found something that ticked all my boxes. It was chunky and tasty and at just the right price point. Perfection.
Feeling pretty pleased with myself, I then tried their tomato sauce, which turned out to be just as wimpy and uninteresting as any other tomato sauce I could buy. So here I realized, aha, these two things are very different! And I felt incredibly stupid for not knowing that.
Smash cut to last week, when the store was sold out of Belletieri's marinara (plenty of their tomato sauce left over though, clearly justifying my opinion in the matter). Since I tend to squeeze in my grocery shopping over my lunch break and don't really have time to mull over options, I quickly snapped up a jar of Newman's Own marinara, figuring, hey, at least it was marinara.
To my dismay, the contents of the jar turned out to be nearly indistinguishable from tomato sauce, and this is why I maintain that I am faultless in the matter. Based wholly on what most manufacturers put on the store shelves, there's no meaningful difference between tomato sauce, pizza sauce, marinara, and so on. Each is, essentially, a thin red puree liquified beyond all recognition, over-saturated with sugar to appeal to the American palate, and topped with the vaguest smattering of seasonings carefully calculated to deceive you into believing that you have purchased a different product.
Anyway, what this means is that I'm basically back to square one in my quest for knowledge here. Also, I can't say it's the most comforting feeling recognizing that my continued mental sanity hinges on my local grocery store dedicating its limited shelf space to what is essentially a jarred sauce underdog.