"You Gonna Brush With That?" - A Look at Tomato Paste in a Tube

I started collecting cookbooks in the mid-1980's. Back then I bought mostly Italian cookbooks. That was before the Internet, Food TV, Whole Foods (as it exists today) and all of the easy accessibility to information and products that we now take for granted. And many of the recipes called for "double concentrated tomato paste" in a tube. Never heard of it except in those cookbooks, never saw it in Shop Rite or Stop & Shop and so I used tomato paste from a 6 ounce can. And my recipes came out fine. But I always wondered if I was missing something.

Well 30 years have passed and I saw this tube of Cento Tomato Paste in Costco. I thought it was a bit pricey but I sprung for it. I needed to try it. I studied the label. I compared it with the labels of other brands of canned tomato pastes. I tried it in recipes. I ate it out of the tube. I did not brush with it. Here's what I learned.

It is not double concentrated. It is more like 1.33x concentrated. I tried and tested the five cans of tomato paste shown below. They are all nearly identical in ingredients and nutritional content. I will compare the Cento to the Kirkland. Kirkland is the Costco brand. Since I bought them together in Costco I will test them together.

I purchased 5 cans to test. They ranged from 57 cents a can for Costco's Kirkland brand to 99 cents for Whole Foods 365 brand.

First question is how much "tomato product" is in the tube vs. the can? Is it double as the name suggests? This can be calculated by looking at the calories on the package. The Kirkland can has 30 calories per 33 grams. The Cento tube has 40 calories per 33 grams. Since the only caloric ingredient in either product is tomatoes, that tells us that there is about 1.33x more tomato for equal mass of tube vs paste.

Next look at the package size. The can is 6 ounces, the tube is 4.56 ounces. Interesting, take the 4.56 ounce tube and multiply it by 1.33 and you get almost exactly 6 ounces. That's right - the amount of "tomato product" in a tube is virtually identical to the can. One tube = one can!

How about the relative price. Cento was packaged as two tubes for $4.89, or $2.45 per tube. Kirkland cans were 12 for $6.79, or $0.57 per can. Since we've established that a can of paste and a tube of paste contain the same amount of tomato product, that makes the tube 2.45/0.57 or 4.3 times more expensive per tomato unit.

How about the taste? They both taste like tomato paste to me. The Cento may have been a tiny bit sweeter but that could have been because of the higher concentration. I doubt that I would be able to tell any difference in a recipe.

How about the convenience? Now we're getting somewhere. If you need only a 1/4 can of tomato paste you can just squirt out 1/4 of a tube (remember that a can and a tube have the same amount of tomato solids) and refrigerate what you don't use. The problem with that is that although you only used 1/4 of a tube, the tube costs 4.3x the price of a can. So you could have used 1/4 of a can and thrown out the rest and saved a few cents.

Once you open a can of tomato paste you are generally committed to using the whole can. Even covered with wrap my paste starts crusting after about a week in the refrigerator. Of course freezing what you don't use is always an option.

Or... you can freeze a can of paste overnight. Then the next day run the can under hot tap water for about 15 seconds. Then remove both lids and while using one of the lids as a pusher, push out the frozen mass of tomato paste. You can the slice what you need and save the rest in a zip-type plastic bag back in the freezer.

You can freeze a can of paste and extrude it out as a single piece to slice as needed.

I will tell you what is cool about the tube paste. It come in a soft metal tube - mostly tin, I think - just like toothpaste came back until the early 60's, I believe. It's not only nostalgic but once you squeeze the tube it stays squeezed.

I found that Whole Foods sells "(not) double concentrated" tomato paste. It is actually less expensive than the Cento that I bought in Costco. The Cento was $4.89 for two 4.56 ounce tubes. The 365 brand was $1.99 for a single 5.3 ounce tube. But the tube is 25 calories per 33 grams, the same as the 365 paste in a can. In other words, Whole foods is just squeezing 88% of a can of their tomato paste into a tube and charging twice as much. The "per tomato unit" price for the 365 is about the same as Cento.

So there you have it. For me, I'll use my tubes but I'm not planning to buy them again. I never saw Bobby Flay or Alton Brown use tomato paste in a tube. Also with freezing as an option I don't see a need to justify the expense. And although the Cento that I bought had a "best before" date that was almost two years away, I don't know if that date is equally valid if I open the tube today versus if I open it 18 months from today. I just don't know. I don't like not knowing!

Did you see that they now sell sour cream in a tube? To be continued.

Authentic Italian Bread, My Ass!

It's Thanksgiving, and that means that I make my own bread for stuffing. I make the stuffing for a very large group, so I baked four loaves. But I still wasn't comfortable that would be enough. So because I was rushed and it was close I dashed down to Giant Eagle to pick up one more loaf of bread. It was a grab and run purchase. It was just bread - Italian bread - what could possibly go wrong?

Giant Eagle is a supermarket chain that, to me, seems to be popular with the Pittsburgh shoppers who are more concerned with convenience than quality. Every time I decide to give them another chance, they burn me. This time they got me on a loaf of bread. Intended for my stuffing, it ended up as bird food. Though the birds deserve better.

Is it just me? No. In this survey by Consumer Reports 68 supermarkets were rated based on criteria such as quality of meats and produce, price, courtesy and cleanliness. Giant Eagle ended up at #54 of 68. Of the stores available to Pittsburgh shoppers Trader Joe's was #3. Other top finishers were Costco (#6), Fresh Market (#9), Aldi (#14) and Whole Foods (#15).

When I saw "Authentic Italian Bread" I imagined a loaf being pounded out on a bakers table with "authentic" ingredients flying everywhere. But this is Giant Eagle. What was I thinking?

When I took the bread out of the bag, it had a very "unauthentic" feel. The loaf was anything but crusty. When I broke an end off of the loaf it had a "foam-like" appearance. Then I looked at the ingredients. Just a loaf of crap. Not in my cooking.

Check out that laundry list of authentic ingredients. "Artificial Flavor" - it must be authentic artificial flavor.
  

A second trip, this time to Whole Foods - and yes, for $1.30 more - I got an authentic loaf of bakery bread. Worth every penny

Pizza On The Rocks

You gotta try stuff. The pictures go back 11 years (2006) to a project that I had all but forgotten about. It's not that it didn't work - in fact, it worked well. But like so many kitchen experiments the energy put in isn't always worth it.

A bag of River Rocks purchased at Home Depot were washed and placed in a 15-inch pizza pan

The pan and its rocks were heated to 500 degrees for an hour

I then built up a standard pizza on my pizza peel. Attention pizza snobs - that cardboard peel was created in 1995 and was in use for 11 years when this picture was taken. 11 more years have passed and it's still in use. At about 25 pizzas/year that peel has seen 500+ pizzas on it!

I slid the pizza onto the rocks. I don't remember how long it was on there but my guess is 6 or 7 minutes.

The 'za is looking pretty good. How does the bottom look?

Interesting, eh?

So here's the problem with all this. I was hoping for something special. You know, you try something different and see what happens. What happened in the case was that the pizza tasted exactly the same as if I cooked it on my standard pizza stone. OK, that's not bad, so why not keep doing it this way if only as a novelty? The problem was smoke. After each use a little cornmeal and maybe even a little cheese would fall onto the rocks. With no way to get it out short of a complete cleaning of the stones each session resulted in more "Crud on the rocks." Pleasant pizza aromas were displaced by a smell like something was burning - which it was! And so ended the great "Pizza on the Rocks, 2006" adventure.