Distinguishing Tomato Sauce and Ingredients

Robot or Mot or Mart . John Griffin wrote in to robot at the uncomparable dot com to ask question that I think is going to be near and dear to your heart. Griffin says, What is and what is not pasta sauce? The phrase pasta sauce is often used interchangeably with tomato sauce and spaghetti sauce. But taking the names literally, pasta sauce might include any sauce applied on top of any pasta, such as mac and cheese? Tomato sauce could just be ketchup or even salsa, and spaghetti sauce clarifies more about the kind of pasta it is used with than anything regarding the sauce itself. I am desperate for the wisdom of a fellow Italian American. I don't hear pasta sauce used that frequently. Like I'm not sure in what context people would use it and what value it would be providing. You're spaghetti sauce a lot because that is kind of the stand in for a tomato based sauce even if, you're not actually putting on a sp itaghetti singing spaghetti sauce. Yeah. And I don't know if that came from the advertising of the jarred sauces or whatever, but spaghetti sauce, I definitely heard but pasta sauce. I mean, it doesn't sound it's obviously broader than salt. It's like something found on the label, right? Like on packaging and that they have to call it something for legal reasons, but I agree. I don't know if I hear people talk about pasta sauce a lot. Yeah, well, I mean, obviously since spaghetti is a specific kind of pasta, you would say well pasta sauce is a more broad term, but spaghetti sauce has no particular link or marriage to spaghetti. You could put spaghetti sauce on tons of different kinds of pasta and that's not weird or strange, just expected. For whatever reason sp ita'ghsetti stuck onto that one . But pasta sauce, like I think you're right that like if you go to the section of the store where they have jars of this stuff and there are different sauces. They're tomato based ones. There are tomato cream based ones, there are , you know, fetuccini Alfredo, whatever creamy things. Like there's lots of pesto pasta sauce . And so this is the pasta sauce section at the store or the aisle or maybe they put it at the end of the aisle saying pasta sauce is here and they'll all different kinds of sauces. But it really is broad. Any sauce that you put on pasta could be called pasta sauce. It's definitely bigger than tomato . And even just within the sort of traditional Italian American sauces that go on pasta, there's a lot to choose from, including ones that have been invented in America. So yeah, I think that's it. It's I don't again, I don't see it commonly used, but it's definitely bigger than tomato and encompasses any sauce you put on pasta. And no, like Mexican salsa is not pasta sauce. It's Mexican salsa. I mean, you can put it on your pasta. You can put anything together with anything, but like that's not pasta sauce. It doesn't become pasta sauce because you just put it on pasta. And tomato sauce, you can buy tomato sauce in a can and it's it's basically like tomatoy watery thing you use as a just like crushed tomatoes or pureed tomatoes. Yeah, I mean, you can buy tomato paste, tomato sauce, crushed tomatoes. These are all things you get in cans and you could use it to make a pasta sauce , but you need to add other things into it. So there's that part of it too, which is it can also tomato sauce is often used to refer to an ingredient that goes in something , you know, large people wouldn't call it salsa. They would call it like they would call it, like you said, you know, crushed tomatoes, pureed tomatoes, or you know, passada has other ingredients in it, I guess. Well, not really. Maybe just salt. I'm telling you, we buy we buy cans of tomato sau . Is that what they're called and start the sentence? Yeah, yeah, yeah. We usually don't we use tomato paste. I think tomato sauce is just tomato paste with more water in it. Just tomato puree, just like Yeah. Exactly. How chopped up are the tomatoes? Yeah, it would be completely yeah, it's a completely uniform kind of watery thing whereas the tomato paste has obviously been kind of boiled down. Have you ever bought or do you have passata ? I don't know what that is now. It is pureed tomatoes but, Italian Italian style. It's like tomato puree, but there's brands that sell it in the U. S. It comes in a glass jar instead of a can . You can see old ladies making it on YouTube, you just take the tomatoes , pick them from the garden and I think they let them dry out a little bit or maybe they just put them immediately in the food mill and anyway you make it, you put it in, it's like a can a jarring thing where I think they like heat up the jars and put the stuff in it and then put the lid on and then it preserves it so then when you need some sauce you, have pre pureed tomatoes from your garden that you put in. That sounds very similar to what you might get from the carnation I don't know if there's anything in it other than salt or even if there's salt and yeah, because for Griffin's purposes , it sounds like what we're saying is pasta sauce sounds just like a very generic term and there are different kinds. And so like if you're looking for a definition of like what's in a pasta sauce, the answer is almost anything can be an apasta sauce because like you said, it could be could be a pesto based, it could be a kind of a more traditional marinara, it could be something more like a pomodoro that's got kind of a cream in it. Like it could be for fetuccious alfredo, it's an alfredo sau ce. There are lots of different things that are pasta sauces. It's not it's not definitive in that way. It's sort of like different sauces that you can use on pasta. That's that's it , right? Yeah, I think that makes sense. Now I'm hungry. Robot