What do time-strapped moms, starving students and eligible bachelors flaunting their cooking skills have in common? At one time or another, each has tossed together an emergency dinner using little more than a box of pasta and a jar of store-bought sauce. And the results earned converts. As the supermarket selection of pastas and sauces has grown, all anyone now needs is a pot of water—and someone to wrench the lid off that jar—to plate some fairly sophisticated pasta-sauce pairings in minutes.
The convenience of store-bought pasta sauce is a tribute to product-development savvy, but belies the tricky processing, formulation, distribution and storage paths a sauce travels from factory to fettuccine. As Chris Kelly, director, technical services, Advanced Food Systems, Somerset, NJ, says, “Depending on whether you’re making a tomato sauce, tomato-cream, cream, cream-and-cheese, or just a Marsala-type wine-based sauce, you need to formulate each individually based on how it’s used, and on how it’s manufactured and stored.”
Feeling the heat
Such complications never wrinkled Grandma’s brow as she stirred and simmered her Sunday sugo with loving patience. But treating a sauce with grandmotherly tenderness is no option for operations cranking out 1,000-lb. batches for commercial sale. Manufactured pasta sauces are subject to a fair share of abuse, and the first arrives with the application of heat.
Rachel Zemser, CCS, a San Francisco–area food technologist who writes “The Intrepid Culinologist” blog on the CULINOLOGY® magazine website, spent years formulating tomato sauces for pasta and pizza applications. “Pasta sauces all have to be heated to a minimum of 175°F to kill off lactic-acid bacteria, yeast and mold,” she says. In a perfect world, that would be the only real heat they see. “Fresh-packed tomatoes that go right from the field into the can” and heated to 165 to 185°F are rendered shelf stable thanks to a sub-4.6 pH, and retain their true tomato flavor, she says, “because they have only been heated one time.”
But we’re not making tomato sauce in a perfect world. Some high-volume processors rely on remanufactured tomato paste and diced tomatoes as key ingredients. “That processed tomato paste or dice is sold to tomato sauce companies who add their own spices, water and seasonings and then reheat it to 195°F for 5 minutes,” Zemser says. “Then into the pouch it goes.” Flavor-wise, these sauces suffer, because they’ve been “double-cooked,” she says. “There is a characteristic cooked-tomato flavor that lacks the freshness you find in fresher tomato sauce.” That cooked flavor increases substantially with retorting, but the only tomato sauces regularly retorted are those that contain at least 6% ground meat and are subject to USDA regulation. Those, she says, “have to be heated to 250°F-plus temperatures to effectively kill off the most heat-resistant pathogen, Clostridium botulinum.”