63. Habemus Campionem Lycopersici

The latest in our series of Made In Canada products

At the end of last month, I investigated Canadian (or at least non-American) alternatives to Diamond Crystal kosher salt. I’m happy to report that I recently found our champion, Aurora Kosher Salt, for even less than I had paid for it: $4.99 at Fiesta Farms, as opposed to the $5.99 I paid for it at Lady York Foods. That’s $0.36/100g instead of $0.44/100g!

Same container, same origin, same price as our winner.

I also noticed that Farm Boy has a private label kosher salt in a container with the same shape as Aurora (albeit in different colours) that, like Aurora, is mined in Sicily. I didn’t need another package of salt, so I didn’t pick it up, but I’m assuming it’s a good if not identical option if you can’t find Aurora.

When I asked my Instagram followers what product I should investigate next, one suggestion stood out: canned tomatoes. I am a big user of them for pizza sauce, cabbage rolls, pasta, soup and other things. My hands-down favourite brand is Bianco DiNapoli from California. I have never had a meatier, more flavourful canned tomato in my life. Alas, not only are they American, they can cost up to $10 per can. Gustarosso tomatoes from Italy (and Eataly) are a close second and solve the “sending dollars to the US” conundrum, but they’re also $10 a can.¹ That’s an added incentive to find a domestic alternative—not only am I hoping to keep as much of my money as possible in Canada, I’m also hoping to keep as much of my money as possible in my possession. Times are uncertain and, as I may have mentioned, paying work has been very slow lately, so I’d love to find a high quality product that checks the value box as well.

I set a few parameters for which tomatoes I would evaluate:

• They must be labeled “Product of Canada”.

• Whole tomatoes only, not diced or crushed.

• No “no salt added” tomatoes. Tomatoes need salt, usually more than the salted cans have added.

• No added herbs or flavourings. I want to taste only the tomato.²

• Only brands that are widely available across Canada. It wouldn’t be as helpful if a brand like Stoney Creek, which meets all of the other criteria but I was not able to find in any store, came out on top.

• Similarly, only products that came in consumer-friendly formats. Testing a brand like Stanislaus Alta Cucina, which are supposed to be terrific but only come in 2.48-litre cans helps no one. (Also, they’re from California.)

So, like Danny Ocean planning a heist, I began to assemble my crew, hitting every grocery store and supermarket that I could think of. By the time I was finished, I have twelve candidates.³

Before we get to how well each candidate fared, let’s talk about my methodology. Because I’m a one-person operation, there was no way to do double-blind testing. I would have to figure the next best thing. Here’s what I came up with.

1. I removed the label from each can and taped the same number to each of them. Then I sequestered the stack of labels far away from the kitchen. My expectation was that with so many different cans and labels, by the time I got around to testing, my sometimes creaky memory would have already cleared its cache.

   

2. I poured each can into a correspondingly numbered deli container for testing.

3. I pureed them with an immersion blender until no large chunks remained. This is what I do for my pizza sauce,⁴ so it was particularly relevant for me.

Research can be a messy business.

And this proved to be effective. By the time everything had been decanted, I didn’t have the faintest idea of which number was which.⁵

To evaluate each tomato, I followed Dan Richer’s Tomato Evaluation Rubric from his book The Joy of Pizza.⁶ The rubric is divided into seven qualities: Colour, Viscosity, Texture and Mouthfeel, Seeds and Skins, Positive Flavour Attributes (not sweetness or acidity), Acidity, and Sweetness. For each quality there are a number of statements. Regarding colour, for instance:

1. Has a bright, vibrant, and ripe colour

2. Is not dull and rusty or white/green/yellow

You score each statement from 1 (“Statement is not true at all”) to 5 (“Statement is completely true and accurate”). Once you’ve evaluated everything, you add everything up and calculate an average across the categories to see who comes out ahead.⁷

And just what were those scores? Let’s have worst-to-first look.

#12—No Name Whole Plum Tomatoes ($1.99)—2.77/5
My notes say “under-ripe and mushy.”

#11—Primo Whole Plum Tomatoes ($1.99)—2.81/5
I was surprised that these didn’t come last. They were awful. Very watery and flavourless. Their high score for lack of seeds and skins saved them.

#10—Giant Value Whole Tomatoes ($1.50)—3.00/5
Another surprise was that these round tomatoes from Giant Tiger⁸ beat out plum tomatoes. For cooking and canning, meatier, less watery tomatoes are the default over round slicing tomatoes.

#9—No Name Whole Tomatoes ($2.00)—3.12/5
Another round tomato, if the label is to be believed, beating its plum counterpart! (Still, beating it to fourth-last place isn’t much of an achievement.)

#8—Selection Whole Tomatoes (I lost my receipt but the Metro website says $1.79)—3.23/5
Another round tomato that saved itself from an even lower score by having few seeds and skins. I expected this to be closer to the bottom.

#7—Aurora Whole Tomatoes ($2.99)—3.25/5
My notes say “soft and underripe,” which seems contradictory, but processing can affect that.

#6—Compliments Whole Tomatoes ($2.19)—3.27/5
There was nothing wrong with these but also nothing particularly noteworthy. Fittingly in the middle of the pack. These are the only tomatoes in the field that don’t say “Product of Canada” on the label but instead say “Made with 100% Canadian Tomatoes.” Hmmm.

#5—Farm Boy Whole Tomatoes (Receipt lost. Instacart says $2.79)—3.36
See #6. Is Empire, owner of Sobeys, FreshCo, and Farm Boy, just making different labels? Possibly not. These ones go one step further than “Product of Canada” to also announce that they are “Ontario Grown.”

#4—Unico Tomatoes ($2.69)—3.41/5
We’re moving into “decent choice” territory. If these were all I could find, I’d buy them. But I wouldn’t be thrilled about it.

#3—Aylmer Whole Tomatoes ($2.99)—3.64/5
I was at my uncle’s 90th birthday party on Saturday and when I told my cousin’s husband about planning to do these tests, he said he’d found Aylmers to be the best. Check out the great palate on Hugh! They had a better texture than many and a nice savouriness that wasn’t present in most of the others.

#2—Primo San Marzano Type Tomatoes (Receipt lost. $2.99 on metro.ca)—3.93/5
Another big score jump from third to second. I didn’t know which brands were which, but these tomatoes and the winner were clearly different from the others. One reason for that is they’re packed in tomato purée, like most Italian tomatoes are, as opposed to tomato juice, like all of the Canadian tomatoes so far. The result is a far more full-bodied puree.

#1—Unico San Marzano Type Tomatoes ($2.69)—4.02/5
Our first 4+ score and the clear winner. Top scores in Viscosity, Texture, Flavour, Acidity, and Sweetness. Again, chalk a lot of that up to being packed in puree. A note I made just after I opened the can says, “tatters.” It looked like all of the tomatoes had been shredded. A quick stir revealed the whole tomatoes beneath. What I had first seen was the puree, which was so thick (and somewhat under-pureed, IMO) that it fooled me. The colour wasn’t quite as good as the Primo San Marzanos, but in every other aspect it was as good or better. I’ve had the Primos before many times, but I will definitely making these my top choice from now on. I don’t think they would necessarily match up too well against a Bianco DiNapoli or a Gustarosso, but they’re Canadian and almost a quarter of the price. That’s a trade (war) I’m happy to make.

Left: 10th-place Giant Value Whole Tomatoes. Right: The winning Unico San Marzano Type Tomatoes. This is pre-blending, so everything on top is purée.

What I’m consuming…

• They Invented the Game. Will They Be Allowed to Play It in the Olympics? (Gift link, so there’s no paywall.) This article has nothing to do with food, but its account of the push to have the Haudenosaunee Confederacy complete in Lacrosse at the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics (and the IOC’s bullheaded refusal to allow it) is one of the most interesting things I’ve read recently.

What’s on the menu…

• Pommes Savonnettes (Gift link)—After my recent forays into the world of Lyonnaise potatoes, I thought I would branch out into another French potato preparation. Pommes Savonnettes are another dish frequently associated with Jacques Pepin. Their name means “soap potatoes” in French because of their shape, which resembles a cake of soap. They’re made by cutting inch-thick, round slices of a peeled russet potato, placing them in a pan with some oil, butter and water, bringing it to a boil, and placing it in a hot oven for about half an hour. During that time, the potato absorbs some of the water and the rest evaporates. The exposed tops of the potato puff up and brown in the oven’s heat while the bottoms fry in the oil and butter. It goes beautifully with steak, chops, y’know, hamburger, cheeseburger, any of your meat dishes. They’re very similar to fondant potatoes, which are cooked using stock instead of water which… actually sounds even better.

• Outdoor pizza! The backyard pizza oven spends its winters in the basement on top of the all-season tires, so when the tires get changed, the oven comes out for the summer. And I can think of no better way to use up the 40-ish cups of pureed tomato I currently have in the freezer than pizza early and often.

1. The Gustarosso has both DOP and non-DOP tomatoes. They DOP go for $10; the non-DOP still go for about $6, which is still a lot.

2. And some salt.

3. I was surprised to discover that Great Value, Walmart’s private label, only has diced tomatoes.

4. This and nothing else, aside from adding salt to taste. I prefer raw pizza sauce to cooked sauce that has a bunch of herbs or garlic in it.

5. Although looking at a few of them, I had some suspicions that turned out to be correct.

6. A book called The Joy of Pizza that includes multiple rubrics and requires you to buy a digital caliper so you can measure the thickness of your ingredients, at least to my mind, misapprehends the meaning of the word “joy.”

7. Because some qualities have more statements than others (2 for Colour, 6 for Positive Flavour Attributes), I calculated an average score for each quality before calculating the average of all qualities.

8. I wasn’t going to include these because there is no Giant Tiger close to us. But I happened to be in Oshawa and drove by one, so I figured I could make this test a little less myneigbourhoodcentric.