That sounds delicious.
I also got a $20 jar of pasta sauce there once. I was embarrassed at how much I paid and didn't tell my wife. After her first taste, her reaction was "OMG, what is this? It's so good!". I took a taste and was blown away. Literally every taste just amazed me, so we kept getting it. I only recognized it by the label and never learned the brand, much to my chagrin (and my wallet's delight) when I moved away and never found it again.
This tomato sauce recipe goes out the the poor guys here. I imagine we are the minority here?
1. Tomatoes--any kind. You will buy them initially to use them for sandwiches, and maybe a salad, but will be left over with a bowl of soft tomatoes at tge end of the week. The rest left older will start to rot, so why not make tomato sauce.
2. In any pot, put in 1/4 cup of olive oil.
3. Put in handful of fresh onions in the hot oil. (You can use dehydrated onion. Many commercial kitchens do.)
4. Add a few teaspoons of fresh garlic, or dehydrated garlic.
5. Add couple of teaspoons of salt, and a pinch of honey, or sugar. I used pancake syrup last night because I ran out of anything sweet.
(add a pinch of cayenne pepper, or black, if you like it spicy.)
Using a potato masher smash it all down. Cook 40 minutes on low.
You now have pasta sauce, or pizza sauce, for the week. Add butter when using it on pasta.
You now have sauce for noodles. Add a few pats of butter for pasta. Your guests won't know, but will like your sauce. Belive me restaurants use a lot of butter, and salt. There's a happy medium. A 1/2 tbs of butter will not kill you. The vegan in the group can use vegetarian butter substitute.
You want pizza?
You need dough?
1. luke warm water added to a large bowl. Add the yeast. Amount doesn't matter. A few teaspoons usually.
2. add some sugar, honey, or whatever. Last night I used pancake syrup.
3. Add high gluten flour if you can find it. Add any flour will do if that's all you have.
4. In the bowl mix it like you dislike it. Add more flour if necessary. Add more water if too dry. Just do it.
Pound that dough. After 20-30 minutes it should be the consistency of a male boob. (I have man boobs, and couldn't think of a politically correct example, but we have all all felt a fatty boob. It's just adipose tissue, and skin. Enough of my analogies you will never hear out of any cooks mouth.)
5. Cover that dough with a wet towel, saran wrap, or foil.
Let it rise in a warm kitchen. Since most of us don't have the right kitchen temp, turn on the oven for a a minute, and turn off. You want the temp between 80-120 degrees.
Put a pot holder on the rack and the bowl of dough goes on the rack. The pot holder acts as a gasket between the warm metal grates, and your bowl.
5. Let it rise for an hour. It's now ready to use for pizza dough, or freezing. You could punch it down again, and let it rise, but unless you have all the right quality ingredients, it dosen't matter. (you could add some oil oil to the dough.)
I'm poor, and have been cooking for myself, and my mom for years.
I was trained at Zesto's Cafe in the 80's by a owner who always accused me of stealing. I was unbelievably honest/ernest at the time. I didn't know how the wealthy lie, and cheat, daily.
I guess because I was in high school, with long hair. I did know other employees whom were stealing, but never said anything. I'm no rat. Then, or now.
Trust me tomato sauce, and pizza dough are easy to make.
Making good bread is very, very hard though.
So hard, I have heard French/Italian chefs gave up, and only buy from their baker. Something about the yeast in the air, and the right climate, along with the right stove.
1) I like to add fresh or dried basil to my tomato sauces. I also grow oregano (it's more honest to say that I can't kill it since it spread everywhere!) and will add a little also.
2) Pizza dough does best when made on the "wet" (higher hydration) side. I learned about these: https://www.amazon.com/Winco-APZS-16-Winware-Seamless-Alumin... from a commercial pizza maker and never looked back. Cooks evenly top & bottom in my oven. It's become one of those things I can't believe I ever lived without. Treat them like a cast iron skillet (another good thing to make pizza in) and don't wash them.
Depends very much on where you live. Most tomatoes I can buy make far worse sauce than canned tomatoes unless I am willing to spend a lot of money. And if I'm spending the sort of money I have to spend to get good fresh tomatoes I'm not 'wasting' them in a sauce. Hell even making sauce with the cheapest tomatoes in the store will no doubt cost me at least twice as much as using halfway decent canned tomatoes for a worse result.
The good stuff spoils pretty quickly, too. It's not just the price that makes them uncommon
(Also there's canned and there's canned.. it's worth paying for unless you just want red broth.)
canned whole tomatoes > tomato sauce
My own tomato story comes from another place in the city where I had a private roofdeck. It was basically full sun all day long. I planted 4 tomato plants, which were amazingly productive, and the tomatoes were so delicious that we ate them with lunch and dinner almost every day. My favorite summer snack became (and still is) a slice of fresh tomato topped with a slice of fresh mozzarella, lightly drizzled with a "green" olive oil, and garnished with fresh basil.
In the EU, "Parmesan" cheese must be legit Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese. [1] I'd presume that Grueyere also has the same protections of origin (despite being Swiss and not actually in the EU).
It's the same for a whole plethora of local products [2] and thus consumers know a) what they're actually buying and b) have the confidence that it's a legit product.
[1] https://www.dw.com/en/eu-court-says-parmesan-cheese-must-com... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_PDO_products_by_countr...
Yep, but it's also relatively cheap if you live anywhere near italy... In slovenia, you can get it even for 12-15eur/kg in some italian discount stores (think aldi, but italian), eg: http://vsikatalogi.si/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Eurospin_ak... (i know it's from 2016, it's just an example).
Getting stuff that you see in american youtube videos is a bit harder here... even "american cheese" (the artifical processed one) is impossible to find.
You can do so in your kitchen fridge, but stick the cheeses in a small plastic container with a tight-fitting lid because they need high moisture (at least 70% - and that's relative moisture).
Open the box when you see condensation forming on its walls and wipe it down with a paper towel. Then close it again. That's about all the work you need to do.
Parmesan should improve markedly in about a year. Gruyere in three to six months.
Oh- unwrap them first from any vacuum bags they happen to be in. Cheese doesn't age in a vacuum.
It's fine if they're already sliced. Would be hard to fit in the fridge otherwise anyway. Depending on your fridge.
https://www.target.com/p/sartori-sarvecchio-parmesan-cheese-...
https://www.wisconsincheesemart.com/products/parmesan-sarvec...
The price is about $7, but you'll notice it's only about 1/3 of a pound, so the per-pound price is $20-21. Which, again, tracks with what I've been saying. The only difference is you might be forced to buy a pound of the real stuff when you get a wedge of Parmigiano Reggiano, so there's a bigger upfront cost, but you'll definitely go through the stuff. It's delicious grated, it's delicious on its own, and it freezes well.
Meaning that we have few dedicated markets here that import goods from Italy, including legitimate Parmigiano Reggiano (and Pecorino Romano which is worth trying). The real stuff has these wonderful salt crystals in it that crunch as you eat it.
Not unique - there's a cheese-shop up the road that sells a mature Gruyère that is quite different from their standard-price Gruyère, which in turn is quite unlike supermarket Gruyère. And that's all on the Swiss side of the border - Comté is the same stuff, but made 100 metres away.
There are many regional variations and qualities of Comté, too.
When De Gaulle asked "How can you govern a country with 200 different cheeses", he was underestimating badly.
One of the legends points out the similarity with Gruyére, but it still calls the French cheese Comté:
"Le fromage de Comté, analogue du Gruyére suisse, se differencie de l' Emmental..."
That's very common. In Greece for instance there's a PDO cheese called "kasseri" but all of northern Greece calls all hard or yellow cheeses "kasseri". Conversely, they call all white cheeses "tyri" ("cheese"), which usually (but not always) means feta, which is in turn a PDO name for a specific kind of white cheese made in certain areas of Greece only.
I guess it's the same thing with French cheeses and Italian cheeses, and every other place's cheeses. Heh.
With the help of my local cheese shop (mentioned upthread) I came across what they call "proper" emmental, which is a very mature emmental, a bit like a mature gouda. Only a bit rubbery. And silly expensive, but very nice.
Where you might be disappointed is if you like "extra mature" British cheddar, which is not really equivalent to "extra sharp" American cheddar. Personally I find both unappealing.
For cheddar specifically, yes, I'd hesitate to buy anything younger, and if I had to I'd only use it in cooking.
Maybe that partly explains my experience/surprise, but a sibling comment shows photos which though not close-up seem much more like what I 'expected', or rather was surprised to notice an apparent lack of.
https://i.imgur.com/WWOuGGW.jpg
https://www.theneighborhoodmoms.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/...
https://s3.amazonaws.com/spoonuniversi-wpengine/spoonunivers...
https://www.mcall.com/resizer/TMbbZ3l7Ik9C7bvyY7rc6Kce43c=/1...
https://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/BN-RZ602_NYCHEE_P_...
(I didn't mean the first part as a claim to expertise; the second was a genuine question.)
I noticed "Fancy cheese" (not velveeta) showing up regularly in the 2000s, when I was starting to shop for myself, and as my cheesy experience grew, "good cheese" like the better stinky ones were more available probably 4-5 years later. Now, even in my local supermarket which is considered the "worst" of all the grocery stores in the area, I can get authentic cheeses from a variety of places.
I don't think people's tastes evolved as much as the supply chain for getting these cheeses around has improved much in recent years, making tasty cheese super affordable.
Most British Cheddar isn't from Cheddar either.
And there's plenty of really good mature Canadian Cheddar for example.
That being said, I'm not ashamed at all to say that the Parmesan I use most is the $4 wedge from Aldi.