In general, the tubes cost about four times as much, averaging $0.67 per ounce compared to $0.16 per ounce for the cans (this excludes Muir Glen, which is organic and costs $0.57 per ounce). Experts told us that this is a matter of logistics—transporting the tubes from Italy costs money. You also get more paste in a can: All the cans in our lineup were 6 ounces, while all the tubes were about 4.5 ounces.
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But the tubes are easier to use—just pop open the seal, use what you need, and put the tube back in the refrigerator. With the cans, you have to crank them open, portion out the desired amount, scrape the inevitable leftovers into another container, and store it in the refrigerator or freezer. (We suggest freezing tomato paste in small portions to make things easier.)
The tubes also last longer. Joseph Cristella IV, the chief operating officer at Cento Fine Foods, which manufactures both tubed and canned pastes, told us that tubed paste will last 30 to 45 days before the flavor starts to change, while a paste that’s been transferred from a can to a sealed container will keep for only seven to 14 days. Our storage tests confirmed this.
All the pastes in our lineup are made with oblong Roma-style tomatoes, which the industry refers to as “processing” tomatoes. They’re bred to have specific characteristics, such as being fleshier and firmer so they yield more solids and can handle being transported. They’re designed to ripen at the same time, so a machine can pull the entire plant up by the roots, which are bred to release easily from the ground.
Companies that sell tomato paste and “ingredient” companies that buy tomato paste to make their own products (such as Heinz ketchup or Stouffer’s lasagna) work with commercial tomato processors to develop pastes to their own specifications. Viscosity (how thick the paste is) and brix (how sweet it is) are defining characteristics.
Once harvested, the tomatoes are transported to a processing facility, washed, and sorted. Aaron Giampietro, a commercial director at the largest tomato processor in the world, Morning Star Packing Company, said the company’s three California factories sort the tomatoes both manually and electronically. The electronic sorter uses a high-speed camera that takes photos of everything coming across a conveyor belt and decides whether it should be there. If it’s, say, a leaf or a stem, a machine activates a lever down the line to discard the item.
After sorting, the tomatoes are ground into a pulpy mash and cooked. Here, the American and Italian processing methods for making tomato paste diverge. American paste is heated according to the hot-break method, which brings the temperature of the paste to around 200 degrees Fahrenheit; Italian paste manufacturers use the cold-break method, heating the paste to about 150 degrees. The processing temperature affects the final taste, color, and texture of tomato paste. A higher temperature darkens and caramelizes paste and deactivates enzymes that would normally break down the fruit’s firming pectin, so the paste stays thicker. The cold-break method, with its lower temperature, yields paste that is looser, brighter red, and fresher-tasting.
Next, the paste is spun at high speed to separate out the pulp and seeds. Then, the remaining tomato juice is pumped into evaporation tanks, which drive off the water. The Italian pastes in our lineup are billed as “double-concentrated”—meaning they’re evaporated for longer—though single- and triple-concentrated pastes are also sold in Italy. Most of the Italian pastes have salt added, and most of the American pastes contain citric acid to ensure that the paste’s pH is low enough so it can be safely canned for long periods of time. Finally, the paste is packaged for sale.
In the plain tasting, our panel identified differences that tracked with the hot-break and cold-break production methods: The American pastes were thicker, with a more cooked flavor, and the Italian pastes were looser, with a brighter tomato flavor. But you’d never eat tomato paste plain, so we needed to find out if these differences would affect a recipe. This proved harder than usual.
We tried the pastes in a couple of different sauces, and the results were very similar; though the Italian pastes are double-concentrated, we had a hard time differentiating them from the single-concentrated products. So we cheated a little bit. We chose a simple marinara sauce recipe, dialed back the amount of crushed tomatoes, doubled the amount of paste, and tried again. This time around, the differences were more pronounced. But ultimately our tasters recommended every product, and the scores of all eight were very close.
Our verdict: Which tomato paste you use doesn’t really matter. Some pastes had more sodium than others, but if you use a paste with less and end up with a dish that tastes underseasoned, just add a pinch of salt and you’ll be back on track. Every paste we tasted was perfectly adaptable.
That said, we do have a preference in the packaging arena: We’re Team Tube all the way. The tubes are so much easier to use and store than the canned pastes. But why is American paste always in cans if tubes are more convenient? We spoke with experts who explained that it comes down to global trends in packaging. The tubes are a form of aseptic packaging, meaning that sterile contents are put in a sterile package in a sterile environment. The cans are processed with retort packaging, which means that food is put into a pouch or can and the container is sealed and then heated, so the food and the container are sterilized together. There’s a strong tradition of aseptic packaging in Europe; the United States has a strong tradition of retort packaging, and changing the equipment would be extremely expensive.
The paste you choose to buy comes down to two factors: convenience and cost. In the end, you can make any of these tomato pastes work well in any recipe.
Have you ever tried using fresh tomatoes in your tomato-based sauces, only to end up with a bland pasta bolognese or a mediocre stuffed zucchini stew? Not exactly exciting for your harshest critics, aka your family members.
Let’s be honest here: Fresh tomatoes are watery and their flavor is not intense enough.
Only tomato paste can transform your tomato meals from dull to sparkly!
It’s also faster to use tomato paste for a tomato sauce than to cut up and simmer a dozen tomatoes. Because your hangry critics are counting the seconds till mealtime too!
Tomato paste is shock-full of health benefits. When you use the real-deal tomato paste that is.
Lycopene, a superstar antioxidant, is abundant in tomato paste and gives it its remarkable reddish color and health properties. Lycopene protects our bodies from oxidative damage, is an anti-inflammatory and reduces the risk of chronic diseases such as:
Cardiovascular conditions
Asthma
Cancers; including breast, lung, ovary, prostate and stomach cancers
Diabetes
Bone loss in post-menopausal women
Gastrointestinal diseases
Age-related neuro-degeneration
Dynasty Product Page
UVA-UVB induced skin damage
It’s critical that you pay close attention to the kind of tomato paste you use, before you make your family have yet another tomato-based stew.
Because when you buy your average supermarket tomato paste, you might think that the sole ingredient in it is tomatoes. And maybe salt. But that’s where you’re mistaken.
There’s a dirty little secret lurking behind the flashy cans of tomato paste and glittering jars of tomato sauce. All producers of tomato products know this dirty little secret. It’s only consumers that don’t know.
Are you aware that China produces and exports most of the world’s tomato pastes? It has even surpassed Italy in overall exports of tomato products. Italy itself is now importing tomato pastes from China!
And here’s where the problem is: There’s a massive food fraud hiding behind China’s glitzy tomato paste industry.
Scientists and the media are luckily exposing this treachery and you can now make better choices when buying your tomato paste.
Chinese tomato paste is almost 50% NOT tomatoes.
It takes approximately 6 kgs of tomatoes to make 1 kg of tomato paste, so Chinese producers add fillers and dyes to their pastes to lower their production costs.
Whistleblowers confirm that tomato pastes produced in China contain almost as much soy starch as they contain tomatoes. Chemical analysis also shows that Chinese producers add acidity regulators, sugars, aspartate, glutamine and dyes to their tomato pastes. These additives don’t appear on the labels and many of them are banned in the European Union for safety reasons.
Chinese producers are negligent about sanitation and food safety and tomatoes harvested in China are contaminated with pesticides, heavy metals and mycotoxins.
Chinese producers use machinery that collect all tomatoes from the fields, regardless of their ripeness level, color or condition. So producers add food dyes to the tomato pastes to make sure the pastes turn out red and not any other off-putting colors.
The cheap Chinese tomato pastes are shipped all over the world, to small local companies or multinationals such as Heinz or Nestle. These companies then package the pastes or further process them into tomato purée, juice, ketchup and pasta sauces.
And the brands that import and use the Chinese tomato pastes are legally able to hide the country of origin of the ingredients in their products. This is due to a loophole in International Trade regulations that allows companies to mark their products as originating in the country where they were last processed and packaged. So even your “Made in the Netherlands” ketchup or “Made in Egypt” tomato paste are using a Chinese tomato concentrate as their primary ingredient.
If you think buying Italian tomato products would ensure that you’re getting quality products, think again.
Buying a “Made in Italy” tomato paste or pasta sauce does not guarantee you’re getting a genuine Italian product.
Tomato products intended for sale inside Italy are now regulated and it is illegal to use Chinese ingredients in local Italian products without explicitly declaring it on the labels. But most Italian tomato products intended for export still use the cheaper Chinese tomato pastes and take advantage of the “Country of Origin” loophole. The producers only mention Italy (the place of final processing and packaging) on the product label, without disclosure of the Chinese origin of the raw materials.
Only if an Italian brand specifies “Tomatoes Grown in Italy” can you be assured that you’re buying genuine Italian tomato products. The rest of the “Made in Italy” tomato pastes and other tomato products are just hiding the origin of their Chinese ingredients like all other international brands do.
Luckily you can still get your hands on genuine tomato paste to prepare your healthy and delicious family meals with.
Seek out tomato products on sale at farmer cooperatives. Farmers still make tomato pastes and sauces the time-honored way. You get authentic tomato products when you directly buy from them while supporting local artisanal production too.
You can find small batch genuine artisanal tomato paste and products at shops specialized in traditional Mediterranean food. Artisanal products tend to be more expensive than commercial ones but they’re definitely worth the additional cost.
If you must buy tomato products from a supermarket, look for Italian brands that specify “Tomatoes Grown in Italy” on the label. The “Made in Italy” mark alone is irrelevant in this case.
But tomato paste that you make yourself is always best. Not only is homemade tomato paste’s flavor outstanding, its health benefits are incomparable too. It’s also easy to make. And with enough tomatoes you can make tomato paste to last you an entire year!
References
Bacanli, M., Başaran, N., & Başaran, A. A. (). Lycopene: is it beneficial to human health as an antioxidant? Turkish Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences, 14(3), 311–318. https://doi.org/10./tjps.
Consonni, R., Cagliani, L. R., Stocchero, M., & Porretta, S. (). Triple concentrated tomato paste: Discrimination between Italian and Chinese products. Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, 57(11), –. https://doi.org/10./jfz
For more information, please visit tomato paste manufacturer.