Mark and I are not fancy people. As such, I've never had spaghetti sauce made from scratch. My spaghetti sauce comes from a car. Usually, I buy Chunky Ragu - Tomato, Garlic, and Onion. It's easily my favorite spaghetti sauce, but we decided to give Prego a shot. We bought their Chunky Garden sauce - Tomato, Onion, and Garlic this past weekend. That was a mistake.
For dinner tonight, we browned a half pound of hamburger. We then added diced yellow peppers, some fresh chopped garlic, and part of an onion, diced. We let that cook a bit more then added the Prego spaghetti sauce. This is how we prep all our spaghetti sauce. We then let it simmer for a while to boil down a bit; it's usually a bit watery out of the jar.
While the sauce simmered, we made crescent rolls and boiled the pasta. When everything was ready, we plated the meal and sat down to eat. It looked really good, but looks can be deceiving.
I'm not sure if it is because I've grown used to Ragu, but I really disliked the Prego spaghetti sauce. I'm having a hard time explaining how it tasted. The flavor seemed off, as if the sauce had spoiled. I know it hadn't, as we had just opened the jar, but that's the best description I can come up with. It was a bit too acidic. Maybe adding a bit of sugar would have helped, but I have never actually added sugar to my sauce, so it never occurred to me. We didn't taste it while cooking, or we would have made adjustments. When we got our first apartment, we would buy the canned spaghetti sauce because it was cheapest. The Prego reminded me of that sauce.
Even though the Prego was more expensive, I prefer Ragu. I will only be buying my default brand from now on. If you're a fan of Prego, do you add something to it to improve the flavor? I may give it another try in the future, when I'm a bit more well versed in tweaking the sauce. Until then, it's Ragu in this house.
I'm not sure the chances of you actually seeing this post, but I'll leave it anyway...perhaps it alerts you to new comments.
ReplyDeleteI'm a Prego guy. In fact, coincidentally, I made spaghetti for supper tonight with Prego, even.
I can't speak to their "Tomato Onion and Garlic"(TOG) flavor, and I certainly can't speculate the ways in which your self-added peppers garlic and onion may clash with their particular flavor. Part of me, though, thinks that perhaps this is the real cause of the problem. It's possible both that their TOG flavor isn't very good, and similarly it's possible that your inclusion of your own, similar but different ingredients may have mixed very poorly.
You might have had a significantly different experience if you added your own onions/peppers/garlic to a less flavorful sauce, like the Meat flavor....or whatever their "normal" flavor is.
I'm a simple man who just gets the "Meat" flavored Prego, and I mix in a pound of ground beef. Nothing more, although sometimes without the beef if I'm out or too lazy.
I grew up on Ragu, but prefer Prego now. Ever since I first gave it a shot a few years ago, I always thought that it tasted more...real. More like an authentic, Italian restaurant style sauce, whereas I think Ragu seems a bit more pasty and...well...it tastes more like it comes in a plastic jar.
I suppose I would say that Prego tastes more like it's made with tomatoes and herbs, whereas Ragu tastes more like it's made in a factory with concentrated tomato paste. Prego just tastes more like it's actually made with vegetable ingredients, and not quite as processed.
Make no mistake, I would still gladly eat Ragu if that's what someone else had or was making. It's not bad. But I stick with Prego.
I wouldn't say Prego is necessarily the best sauce in the world, but it does sound to me like perhaps your first experienced was a bad combo of flavors, rather than indicative of a terrible line of products.
On a related note, I thought this TED talk was interesting, and it actually talks about Prego sauces and what they've done to be the superior spaghetti sauce :-P
http://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_on_spaghetti_sauce.html
Perhaps you are correct; maybe I just picked a bad flavor to start with. I'm going grocery shopping this afternoon; perhaps I shall pick up the meat flavored sauce and go from there.
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