[acalzycalzy]

Side note: the reason pasta sauces made with canned tomato base taste so much better than pasta sauce from scratch is that the water taken out from the canned stuff is done with a vaccum evaporizer: it’s able to boil out the water at a temp of 140F vs 212F on a stove top. Less heat == more flavor

[Syzygies]

Tom Colicchio, Thomas Keller, Paul Bertoli and many other chefs have their version of "precious tomatoes", a tomato confit. None of these recipes scale. After many years of struggling with home dehydrators, I bought one of those full sheet pan carts you see in bakeries, enclosed it in nice plywood, added a 1500W wall heater, brewery temperature regulator, and a crawl space fan that looks like it belongs in a stereo rack. The top and bottom sheet pans serve as buffers and spares, but the middle six sheet pans (lined with silpat) can process 60 lbs of heirloom garden tomatoes at a time. We often grow twenty plants and supply family and friends, so this scale is necessary.

We skin, slice, spread onto oiled silpat, salt, and partially dry tomatoes till "gooshy", about 25% of original wet weight. We then vacuum pack 220g or so to a pouch, and store in a chest freezer till needed.

This equipment also makes great southern Italian concentrated tomato paste, "estrattu". My favorite tomatoes for these are dry-farmed Santa Cruz Early Girls, which I'm put up in a blind taste test against any tomato grown in Italy.

Cleanup is pretty easy, on the lawn with an electric pressure washer. This is a good time to give one's molcajete a cleaning too, if the coarse stone has been trapping food.

I can't eat canned tomatoes; I have to avoid tomato dishes in even the fanciest Italian restaurants. It baffles me why no one is doing what I do on a commercial scale to supply their restaurants, selling the extra through Eataly.

[WaxProlix]

Oh my god, not sure if they were specifically that variety but we used to get dry farmed tomatoes from the farmers market in Santa Cruz and they were incredible. Too expensive for me to make a sauce out of at the time, so they just went on bread or with cheeses usually. Really great tomatoes out there. I wonder if I could get a crate shipped...

[magneticnorth]

Can you grow your own tomatoes?

I've also had Californian dry-farmed early girls, and those are definitely the best tomatoes I've ever paid for.

That said, I think home-grown early girls or other small flavorful varieties are equally good even if you can't properly dry-farm them, so long as you can let them stay on the vine until fully ripe.

[WaxProlix]

Not in my current situation, no, but it's a priority if/when that changes.

[nkurz]

I'd be interested to hear more about your technique. What were the issues with the dehydrators you tried? Are you pre-boiling to peel skins or do you have some other way? Are you scooping and discarding the "guts" or are your tomatoes dry enough to do whole? Are you blowing air through the heater on the way in to the plywood box, or do you have the heater in the box? What temperature are you drying at, and where are you measuring it?

[Syzygies]

I've been planning to put up a web site with plans, as most DIY plans out there are rather sketchy. For most DIY engineering projects I have a pretty good idea of the practical physics, but this challenged me and involved some false steps on the way to a working design. What heat and airflow did I need? That was an empirical question, I couldn't find equations that were relevant to practice in this instance.

I have to go to work shortly, I'll try to update this if you check back.

My heat source is a Cadet Com-Pak 1500-Watt 120-Volt Fan Heater, suspended by metal angle irons in a cradle underneath the unit, intake filtered by a generic 12" air filter. I convinced myself that the wood never got hot because of the gap and airflow, but the auto shutoff in the heater itself was too sensitive for me to drive the dehydrator hard. I shorted its thermostat and added my own from Digikey. This allows me to aim for temps up to 145 F without the heater cutting out.

I regulate the temperature using a Ranco Electronic Temperature Control from a beer making supply company.

I regulate airflow using a AIRTITAN T8-N, CRAWL SPACE AND BASEMENT VENTILATOR FAN. Expensive but slick.

The dehydrator operates very effectively if one has outdoor barbecue experience. While I managed to weave the airflow tray to tray, one needs to tend the trays every few hours, and there can be front or back edge effects from a leaky airflow. This is nothing new to anyone comfortable with fires, but frustrating if one expects a perfect abstraction. Believe me, I've thought about redesigns with perfect air mixing, and they all double the size of the unit, which already looks like a washing machine.

The Italian grandmothers making estrattu on tables in the Sicilian sun have to worry about which tables first get afternoon shade. Nothing new here, the issues just take a different form.

This relates to your temperature measurement question. I choose middle locations for both thermostat probes, and I also have two TelTrue analog thermometers. Like BBQ, the idea of a single temperature is misleading. One flies this ship somehow, with better results than I know how to obtain any other way.

[nkurz]

Thanks, sounds like a great project. Please add a link here to your web site if you ever make it. I try to check my old comments occasionally, so will probably notice eventually.

[Larrikin]

In what country are you based?

I've heard from pretty much every cooking source I follow that the reason canned taste better than fresh is because nearly all US tomato varieties sold fresh have been bred for their ability to be picked early, be transported long distances, hit with ethylene gas, and look good in the store. Taste isn't a factor in those tomatoes, in fact the grainy thick inner walls and small flavorful jelly sacks help in transportation. Fresh tomatoes in other country tend to be far better with much bigger jelly sacks.

Canned tomatoes don't have an in store look to worry about and are different varieties. The canning process might help in sauce creation but isn't the main factor in the US

[cafard]

Amen on the US tomato varieties. They ship beautifully, they will sustain any handling gentler than a baseball bat, and they taste like nothing in particular. We eat fresh tomatoes from mid-summer through early fall, when local farms have tomatoes bred to eat rather than to ship.

[Gibbon1]

My mother used to strangely do audits for canneries.

You are correct. All the tomato's that arrive from the field nice and ripe get canned.

[samstave]

A bit of an aside on the canned-tomato piece ;

I exclusively buy Classico Sauce, because for the price of the sauce that you get, you also get an ATLAS Mason Jar... with oz markings as well in the glass...

So for sometimes, $2 you get a 16oz of all sorts of flavors of sauce, and a Mason jar to boot.

-

Also, since this is HN - the Mason Jar was basically either invented by or perfected by the BALL brothers.

The BALL brothers evolved from inventing the mason jar to making some of the most sophisticated and, I believe, top secret components for a lot of stuff that winds up in orbit...

[neilv]

Is that Classico jar a real mason jar, suitable for canning?

Edit: The Web isn't 100% conclusive on this (e.g., a /r/canning comment will seem to acknowledge generally-accepted wisdom that Classico jars cannot be used for canning, but then someone else will follow up with a comment saying it works for them). But Classico themselves have said that their jars are thinner than canning ones, and also have a coating that's a problem: https://old.reddit.com/r/Canning/comments/gjme5m/testing_out...

[samstave]

I dont use them for canning, sadly, as canning seems too daunting for my cooking skill level ATM...

What I do use them for is drinking glasses, and I make custom leather sleeves for them and give them out as gifts.

I buy Bamboo or Copper lids for them for aesthetics, but I personally just use them to drink from, or to transfer soups/stews (my favorite things to make) to friends and neighbors.

I DO NOT belive they are safe for canning, as I had one shatter after going from hot to cold too quickly, so I do believe they are too thin to can in, sadly.

But I am curious about the coating - hadnt heard that - and need to look into it. Thanks for the heads-up

[acalzycalzy]

US.

That being said some of the best canned tomato products are Italian.

The best American canned tomato is Stanislaus - only available to food service companies

[AlbertCory]

That's what I've always heard, but OP's explanation also makes sense.

[giardia]

> pasta sauces made with canned tomato base taste so much better than pasta sauce from scratch

That's a matter of taste, to say the least. You could probably come up with all sorts of metrics that show that canned tomatoes have more of this or that, but pasta sauce made with fresh tomatoes taste like tomatoes, canned tomatoes taste like imitation tomatoes or almost like ketchup in comparison. It sounds like you might've not reduced the fresh tomato sauce enough or something.

I won't deny that I use canned 99.99% of the time though. They win on every metric except taste.

[ghshephard]

Tomatoes are one of the few exceptions when it comes to canning - they always taste fresher and more tomato like than fresh store bought tomatoes - and are preferred in most recipes.

The third option, would be garden fresh/farm delivered tomatoes - but they have a shelf like of about 3 days and can't handle transport - so the odds of seeing them outside of a farmers market (or your backyard garden) - are next to nil.

[bigDinosaur]

It is not the case that canned tomatoes taste fresher at least in my experience. For one they have acidity added - on top of already acidic tomatoes - to reduce the risk of botulism or they're heated in the can which gives them a slightly odd taste, certainly not the same as freshly picked ripe tomatoes.

Maybe I've just only ever had inferior canned tomatoes, or the tomatoes I've grown have been particularly good.

[pigsty]

I do think everyone here is making the point that store-bought tomatoes are inferior to canned ones. Home-grown vegetables picked and consumed at the peak of ripeness will always be better than store-bought and artificially ripened, and the likelihood of them being better than canned/frozen is pretty high.

[bigDinosaur]

The original top level poster did just say 'from scratch' but I will grant that if 'store bought' is what people are discussing (as the comment I responded to was, I missed the word) that I do agree. That's mainly due to the tomatoes not being bred for flavour or picked long before ripening or stored long term as far as I know, though.

[aap_]

> pasta sauce made with fresh tomatoes taste like tomatoes

That probably only works if you live in a country blessed with actual tomatoes. In Germany e.g. it's not easy to find tomatoes that taste like tomatoes.

[acalzycalzy]

Ha sure a matter of taste…BUT i stand by the fact that 99% of people don’t know jack about what tastes good.

[epolanski]

As an Italian I find your post quite wrong for so many reasons, most importantly because there's an endless amount of recipes and because in Italy alone we have hundreds of different tomatoes in color, size, sweetness, acidity taste and methods of preparation.

Pasta made with fresh tomatoes is absolutely great and it is ridiculous to even think the opposite. The boiling is only done for some kind of tomatoes and it is done to peel it, heat does not make it lose any flavor.

[tptacek]

That's fascinating and all, but vacuum dehydration does in fact preserve volatiles (the same way rotovap vacuum distillation preserves volatiles in liqueurs), and canned tomatoes generally are better than out-of-season fresh tomatoes.

[acalzycalzy]

“As an Italian” - eh lots of cultures use tomatoes.

[epolanski]

Sure, but we're arguing about an italian dish.

[blooalien]

> "Less heat == more flavor"

… And that's why my grandma insisted on an all-day (and sometimes all-night) low temperature simmer for such sauces instead of trying to "boil the life out of it" as she used to put it. You can totally taste the difference though. There's a "richness" to a slow-simmered sauce you just don't get from a hurried boil or any sort of quick thickeners.

[tptacek]

Any simmer is probably going to be at a high enough temperature to lose all the same volatiles. 60c (vac dehydrator) to 90c (bare simmer) is a huge jump.

[agumonkey]

a metaphore for life I suppose

[lucideer]

There's huge variation in taste of both canned tomatoes & passata between different brands, and I've made much better pasta sauce with fresh tomatoes than a can. When they've been good, in-season local tomatoes. I've also made worse pasta sauce with fresh tomatoes in winter.

I'm fairly sure the quality of the ingredients will have a much bigger impact than temp.

That said, cooking on a low heat for as long as possible does give you the best results.

[Ekaros]

But aren't the cans in commercial canning heated to much higher temperatures for preservation? Even if nothing is evaporated.

[stcroixx]

I don’t think I’ve ever had a canned or jarred sauce that was even close in taste to even the most basic homemade version.

[SamBam]

I don't think OP was referring to jarred sauces, rather home-made sauces made using canned (tinned) tomatoes, as opposed to fresh.

The majority of Italian tomato-based sauces call for canned tomatoes.

[Larrikin]

Canned whole tomatoes used in recipes are not comparable in any way to canned or jarred premade tomato sauce.

[wodenokoto]

Isn't it more that tomatoes are canned when ripe, while fresh tomatoes are ripened after picking.

[sojournerc]

I think you haven't had good sauce made from scratch.

The key is a base of mushroom broth, with roasted garlic, and good tomatoes.

I don't disagree that a lot of home made sauces don't compare, but done right, traditional recipes are far better.

Don't repeat your thinking in Italy...

[wackget]

Got any recommended recipes to try?

[sojournerc]

Not a recipe exactly, but... Mushroom broth from a pound of baby Bella. Clove of garlic, confit in oil until brown. Can of Merazano tomatoes. Combine, slow simmer with fresh oregano. Blend, salt to taste.

Better than any can sauce I've had

[schoen]

I happened to buy some mushroom broth powder at an Italian grocery store recently, so maybe I can try using it for this; do you know how that's likely to compare to a broth made from fresh mushrooms?

[wackget]

Thanks. Is there a name for this kind of sauce?

Searching just brings up a bunch of "pasta with mushrooms" dishes, or cream-based mushroom sauces without tomato.

[quantum_magpie]

You disagree with the OP about canned tomatoes, and then in your recipe you use.. canned tomatoes?

[sojournerc]

You're right. I had misread their comment

[bee_rider]

These huge companies have massive resources, lots of food scientists and labs to throw at the problem. Traditional recipes are nice amateur attempts but surely the Italians don’t expect these to compete with the food-industrial system?

[Gordonjcp]

Which problem do you think they're throwing their resources at? Making the sauces taste good? They don't need to make the sauces taste good, because Marketing will just invent a little cartoon Italian grandfather with bushy eyebrows and a straw hat and a little cartoon grandmother with a long dress and her grey hair pinned up in a bun who makes him his dinner, and he'll tell you it's delicious in a comedy (and slightly problematic) accent, and you'll believe him and buy the sauce.

No no no.

The massive resources and food scientists and labs are there to make an inexpensive and highly shelf-stable tomato-based sauce product. It doesn't matter how it tastes, Marketing will fix that, Graphics will do a lovely tomato-and-basil colour scheme for the jar label that evoke the little terraced tomato farms of Campania, and it'll fly off the shelves. Especially when they air the advert where Nonno and Nonna wink at each other across the table with a little sparkle in the air, implying that despite their advanced age they're still at it like knives. That stuff plays like crazy across all the demographics.

And you'll eat it anyway.

[bee_rider]

I was just yanking that guy’s chain. Was expecting more hate, though!

[Gordonjcp]

Would it help if I said "I'm not angry I'm just disappointed"?