Just a question

Hi, so my family generally makes homemade food, they feel that it’s better. I agree. My family and I have made homemade sauce and homemade meatballs for spaghetti. Do you guys think food is better homemade? I also put prego sauce on my spaghetti.

[Cooper27 Administrator]

We generally prepare everything at home too. Sometimes when you're learning it can be a case of trial and error, but you also get to adapt things to suit your own tastes.

Why not try a homemade meatball sauce next time? The jars of sauce can tend to have quite a bit of sugar in them. I recall a similar brand saying their sauce sauce should only be eaten as an occasional treat, due to the sugar content.

We use garlic, passata, herbs and a bit of tomato puree.

[TheAwfulToad]

Broadly, I'd say yes, for several reasons.

Stuff-in-jars is made with the cheapest possible ingredients. It has to be - otherwise, how would the manufacturer make a profit? If you make your own sauce, it might cost slightly more because you're missing out on economies-of-scale, but it's going to be better quality.

A lot of packaged stuff uses either starch or sugar to modify the mouthfeel and/or reduce the ingredients cost. Here's the Prego list:

Tomato Puree (Water, Tomato Paste), Diced Tomatoes In Tomato Juice, Sugar, Canola Oil, Contains Less Than 1% Of: Salt, Dehydrated Onions, Spices, Citric Acid, Dehydrated Garlic, Onion Extract, Garlic Extract.

but the cheaper you go, the more likely you'll see those two on the list at higher positions (ie., there are more of them).

Note that even Prego is basically just tomatoes and little else. So why not buy some tomatoes? It's a completely pointless product. A lot of packaged products are like this: they take advantage of the consumer's unwillingness to get too adventurous in the kitchen. Even relatively complex-looking products (eg., microwave chicken curry) are incredibly simple to make from scratch if you know what you're doing.

A rather insidious problem with packaged sauces is that they invariably designed to be eaten with a mountain of carbs (pasta or rice, usually). That means the average person is going to be eating a very carb-heavy diet, for years on end, which inevitably results in obesity eventually. Add in the fact that the sauces themselves are sugar- and starch-based, and you're looking at a very unhealthy picture.