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.

  • @[email protected]
    4•2 days ago

    Thumbing through my copy of “On Food and Cooking” by Harold McGee, I didn’t find anything specifically comparing fresh vs canned tomatoes for pasta sauces, but it does mention:

    Fresh tomatoes readily cook down to a smooth puree, but many canned tomatoes don’t. Canners frequently add calcium salts to firm the cell walls and keep the pieces intact, and this can interfere with their disintegration during cooking. If you want to make a fine-textured dish from canned tomatoes, check the labels and buy a brand that doesn’t list calcium among its ingredients.

    • @linearchaosEnglish
      2•2 days ago

      during cooking. If you want to make a fine-textured dish from canned tomatoes, check the labels and buy a brand that doesn’t list calcium among its ingredients

      You can also buy canned “seeded, skinned, crushed” tomatoes which are already 90% of the way there. I generally don’t buy anything more processed than it needs to be, but in canned tomatoes, it doesn’t seem to matter.