Canned tomatoes are a pantry staple that most of us always have stocked. The sheer diversity of canned tomato brands is a testament to their importance as a foundational ingredient in everything from pizza sauce to bowls of chili. Tasting Table staff writer Hayle Hamilton Cogill took on the tedious task of taste testing 16 canned tomato brands and ranking them based on taste, availability, and quality of ingredients. While there were plenty of contenders worthy of your consideration, Contadina tomatoes should be best left on store shelves.
The over 100-year old New York-native brand boasts Roma tomatoes that are GMO-free, grown in California, and as sweet as their Italian counterparts. Unfortunately, these sweet tomatoes translate to an overly sweet canned product. The sweetness overwhelms the other natural flavors you want from a tomato like tang and umami, which the heat of a canning process should enhance. Furthermore, Contadina canned tomatoes contain crushed tomatoes with their peels attached, creating an unpleasant texture and bitterness. While you can run the canned tomatoes through a strainer to rid them of their bitter skins, you’ll reduce the content and waste a percentage of each can.
Contadina’s founders attempted to produce tomatoes with an Italian taste and missed the mark. But our taste tester did agree that Italian tomatoes have a superior taste, which is why she crowned the Italian-imported brands Cento San Marzano peeled tomatoes and Mutti crushed tomato polpa as her first and second choices.
Canned tomatoes: Best uses and cooking tips
Contadina canned tomatoes aren’t worth the space in your pantry, but that shouldn’t stop you from buying better options. In many instances, canned tomatoes are better suited than fresh tomatoes. You should use canned tomatoes instead of fresh for cooked dishes like sauces, stews, and soups. Pizza and pasta sauce are the most obvious applications, and the canned tomatoes most traditional recipes call for are sweet Italian-imported tomatoes. Perhaps the perfection of Italian-style canned crushed tomatoes lies in the simplicity of ingredients as most contain nothing more than tomatoes and salt.
So, even if you don’t buy an Italian-imported brand of canned tomatoes, a canned tomato brand with a similarly short ingredient list might be the best choice. You get a purer concentration of tomatoey flavor that you can doctor with fresh aromatics, spices, and herbs. If you find a canned tomato product to be overly acidic — which might be the case with the cheaper cans — then you can add a teaspoon of sugar or diced carrots to temper its tartness. At the other end of the spectrum, if canned tomatoes are too sugary, like the Contadina brand, a squeeze of lemon juice will help curb the sweetness.
