A product that often sits on a shelf in the pantry until opened and then is relegated to a fridge shelf if advised to refrigerate after opening . The humble tomato sauce . Taken for granted yet often used by some .
The tomato sauce I buy is Mon . An old Australian Company . It is gluten free and still comes in glass bottles : 580ml .
Availability is an issue with this product . I live in suburban Melbourne and only selected Woolworths and IGA stock it .
Therefore availability of a product would be appreciated in your responses .
If you make your own please feel free to contribute .
My wife only likes Masterfoods Tomato Sauce but I donāt like any tomato sauce.
For me, it is Masterfoods Smokey Barbecue Sauce for suasages, Holbrooks Worchestershire Sauce for pies and Huy Fong Sriracha Sauce for everything else.
Thanks for that sauce recipe Gaby @Gaby . The one thing I have noticed with a lot of the "off the shelf " tomato sauces is the high sodium (salt ) content .
We donāt use that muchā¦a 500mL bottle will last a year or more.
When we do buy, we used to buy the Dick Smith one until it was discontinued/no longer stocked in our local supermarket. Now we try to buy tomato sauces which are product of Australiaā¦but it is becoming more difficult to also get ones made by Australian owned businesses (most are made by the multinationals).
Will have to keep an eye out for Mon ā¦as never knew it existed.
I also use tomato sauce rarely - so would also be interested in (the real) shelf life of tomato sauceā¦ as I have a Dick Smith (virtually full) bottle with a B/before date of November 2017 (which is kept in a pantry).
I also wonder how important/necessary ārefrigerate after openingā advice really is: just a ācover our backsideā statement or necessary for good health??
I tried to downsize my refrigerator recently, but was beaten by the amount of space needed to store opened containers of assorted pickles, pastes, sauces, mustards etcā¦
PS I live in SA so IGA (& some Coles/Woolworths) stock Beerenberg products - their tomato sauce I keep in the refrigeratorā¦
I often buy Beerenberg strawberry jam but the sauces are not available near me in Melbourne . I see they have an online shop . Might buy a bottle and see how it goes .
I buy Masterfoods low sugar and salt. It tastes as good as anything else and does have fewer carbs, so its all good. Donāt use it much, but when I want itā¦ I want it. Sausages without tom sauce are boring.
Tom sauce not our family thing - I had to check if we had anything. Thereās a slightly used bottle of Coles Heston sauce 18 months beyond the best used buy date in the fridge. Seeing it, I recall bought for $3 when they ditched the brand.
Whatās the difference with Ketchup? Some brands have both.
EDIT: ā¦ on the other side, thereās a slab & half of Mutti chopped tomatoes & a six pack of Mutti puree
I love dead horse, buy anything made in Aus. Never kept it in the fridge until recently, a youngster said you should. With all the sugar, salt, vinegar and whatever thatās in it I doubt it could go off. Sort of a human preservative, maybe thatās why Iām still kicking lol.
What thinks you about plastic versus clear glass bottles?
I sometimes think, that if it has gone mouldy in a plastic bottle, you would never know, so I make a point of only buying glass and examining the surface before I use it.
Glass is non porous, doesnāt absorb odours and germs. Can be washed in very high temperatures and reused many times.
Itās also 100% recyclable
But it can break, and it can be difficult to get the sauce out of it: you tap and tap, nothing comes out until it decides to all come out!
Plastic is lighter and itās a lot easier to squeeze out the sauce.
But only a small percentage is actually recycled.
To tell if it has gone bad, you can go by smell. A fishy smell is always suspicious especially if the use by date has gone by for a while!
We generally just buy whatever is on special, tho not particularly keen on Heinz Ketchup or the redesigned Woolies one. With Beerenberg you can go to their website, put in the barcode and BB date and find out who made the product, when it was made and where the main ingredients came from. As a side note, we never keep it in the fridge, even after itās open. We keep all other sauces in the fridge tho.
Depends who you talk too. Heinz themselves say the products are different, with ketchup being thicker. Matt Preston says that Ketchup is thicker and sweeter while sauce is more vinegary. And according to ingredients labels ketchup contain more tomato.
And this explains how Catsup/Ketchup originated in 544BC, made from fermented fish guts before becoming mushroom or walnut based before then becoming tomato based
