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[QUESTION] What are your favorite spices to use in soups?
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Good quality canned is generally preferred.
You can make tomato sauce from fresh tomatoes, but it is a serious time investment, and you will, at best, end up with the same product quality as canned.
Here's Alton Brown's recipe for tomato sauce from fresh tomatoes:
https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/tomato-sauce-recipe-1912571
It's difficult to find quality, properly vine-ripened tomatoes. They have such a short shelf life and ship poorly when ripe, so almost everywhere that produces them picks them green and ships them to markets. They hit them with a little ethylene and bam, bright-red, blemish-free, bland, semi-unripe tomatoes. But places that produce canned tomatoes can pull them right when they're perfect, skin them, seed them, cook and mill them and store them away.
If you can find a local farm with quality vine-ripened tomatoes, you still need to seed them, roast them, skin them, and mill them. You just want the flesh, and you want it to be cooked and smashed to death.
And for consistency, a good can of San Marzano will be the same every time.
Price Comparison depends on what you have access to and what season it is. If you buy local farm-grown tomatoes in bulk, you can probably make it somewhat cheaper. If you're just buying them from the grocer and they're out of season, you won't be able to touch the quality for the price.
Carbon FP is an interesting take. They'll spend less energy per tomato doing them in huge batches. But you're not going to can them, But the cans are recyclable, but recycling uses electricity. Presumably, you're going to get them hyper-locally, but the added shipping cost to send the few you're using to market is marginal. I'd say it's almost, but not quite a wash with it being a little better locally. You'd also be supporting local farms which is good for everyone. Of course, this also means you need to be getting them in growing season so they aren't getting shipped up from equatorial countries.
TL;DR
It's probably not noticeably cheaper, or higher quality than good quality canned, but that's no reason not to do it.
Energy wise your stove is probably not as energy efficient either - the stove itself might be, but large batches mean a better volume to surface area ratio and they have some incentive to look at the energy usage as it is a large cost so they may be finding other ways to control energy.
IMO doing a correct tomato sauce (yes it's quite time consuming and you should take extra care of how you do the onions, again IMO) it's wildly better.
Fun tip, undercook your pasta and finish cooking them in the tomato sauce!
I'm wondering how people do their sauce if canned is even equal in taste but well 🤷🏼♀️