Leave it to me to wait until after I both polled you all and cooked all my tomatoes to refer to the cookbook that sits on my shelf. [The phrase "sits on my shelf" is highly sensitive to the location of that "h".] From my America’s Test Kitchen Test Kitchen Favorites - The 2007 Companion Cookbook to the Hit TV Show:
When it comes to cooking, we prefer to go with good canned tomatoes. Juice-drenched seasonal tomatoes, available only a few weeks a year, are reserved for eating raw on mayonnaise-slathered bread or straight off the cutting board.
They tested 10 brands of whole tomatoes and found the the 4 Italian brands were quite horrible.
For decades, Italy has been synonymous with superior tomato quality, so these results were puzzling. First, we checked the tomato variety used for each brand, in case the difference was as simple as plum versus round. All of the Italian samples were plums, while the American samples (our top five brands) were split down the middle between plum and round. but tomato variety proved to have little to do with our preference.
The stale taste of the Italian brands in our lineup, it turns out, has more to do with trade laws than crop differences. In 1989, the United States imposed debilitating punitive tariffs on imported European fruits and vegetable–from 13.6 percent to an exorbitant 100 percent. Unsurprisingly, Italian tomato prices went through the roof, and sales of imported tomatoes dropped off dramatically. To avoid paying the steep duty, Italian tomato canners eventually began packing their tomatoes in tomato puree rather than juice. The loophole? When packed in juice, tomatoes are considered a “vegetable”; when packed in puree, they’re a “sauce,” which carries a much lower customs duty. Sure enough, the Italian brands were all packed in a thick puree (even though two brands inaccurately call it “juice” on the label).
Food, economics, and stupid trade laws. That’s my idea of a great post.
Good job.