Is supermarket pasta any different to branded?

[reallyworriedjobhunter]

I am talking normal pasta.

One of the tubes in this photo is Napolina and one is Sainsbury's. No discernable difference at all? The Napolina one is very slightly bigger.

For a 500g packet, Napolina is £1.50 and Sainsbury's is 69p.

Sadly, those ‘grannies’ were a product of a patriarchal society where the women had to stay home spending hours making bloody pasta and not daring to suggest their DHs nipped down the supermarket on the way home from work for a box of linguini for a quick tea!

Barilla or Napoli a pasta in a box, you may as well buy supermarket own.
de Cecco on offer, stock up

Tesco used to sell Martino pasta which was by far the best supermarket
brand, then stopped selling it, then introduced a Finest pasta on offer for
a while - I suspect its the same pasta but marketed in Tesco name.
We didn’t rate Rummo, Liguiri is good too, love the old fashioned looking
packets.
Good quality dried pasta is pale, as any you would buy in Italian supermarkets.

When friends and family bring us pasta from Italy its such a treat. Garafolo
or similar is the closest we find here, only on offer with Ocado.

want pasta now, think I may make us a carbonara for brunch
maybe breakfast

I can't remember which programme it was but remember the lads and the "lady pasta"😁

Does the pasta flattener have the ability to also do the alphabet and paw patrol shapes?

Was that the same programme where they only ever shopped at the corner shop and even when things they bought all the time were on offer, they'd only ever buy 1 so instead of getting 2 jars of pasta sauce for £2, they were paying £1.50 each.

Then they swapped 'lady pasta' at £2 a pack for Lidl at 45 p and they either thought it was exactly the same, or possibly better.

Not necessarily! Family in Italy eat tonnes of dried pasta day to day, but on special occasions they will make fresh egg pasta from their region. Yes, it is the older women doing it and that is the patriarchal part, but also to do with losing skills because younger relatives have moved to places with different cooking traditions.

They certainly weren’t being forced to do it because dried spaghetti was banned from the house! No different to taking the time to cook a Sunday roast from scratch (which was also a job for my mum when I was growing up).

fascinating article, thank you,

Tesco finest - we stocked up on this when it was on offer last year
its good enough to eat with only oil, or salty butter and black pepper,
in a large bowl with a chopped up basiled tomato at the side, let
the pasta shine

they do Orechiette, little ears, as in your picture, solid and delicious

I'd be interested in your evaluation of the tinned toms.
I don't buy the really, really cheapo tins of toms as there is more water in them, but despite recipes exhorting us to buy the best possible brands, I've never really been able to beat a mid range brand with an added big squirt of tomato puree. It works for me.

Also, with cheaper brands I tend to boil vigorously for a few minutes to reduce it and concentrate the flavour.

Madness

@Soontobe60

Mine used to make pasta even as toddlers, once we had pasta making as a birthday party activity. It's like doing play dough but useful!

We normally have Lidl wholemeal pasta for the record, because white pasta gives me heartburn! Buckwheat is even better for me but £££

^^ This is my opinion on pasta too so in the case of your photo, I’d pick own brand.

That's it! They probably weren't allowed to say the brand name or something, but they kept saying "lady pasta" like they were drooling over the lady picture on the packet 😆

For tomatoes we have tried the napolina and cirio brands of plum tomato( hubs is a brand snob) we found them both watery and surprisingly tasteless .Every tin we opened had either at least one green tomato or one with a black end on it . Now we buy growers harvest brand plum tomatoes from Tesco and they are fab. I've never been a fan of eating them as they are before, I just used them for pasta sauce, but these are really lovely and the sauce is good too.

I do sneaky taste tests with my husband all the time, someone mentioned weetabix on here , that was his favourite, but now he eats either Morrisons wheat biscuits, or the Tesco ones ( not Stockwell , the next brand up) he loves them and they're half the price !. Another good brand swap he couldn't tell the difference with was Jacobs cream crackers and Tescos own, massive difference in price, look and taste the same.

Yes !

I buy de cecco or molisana. DH doesn't like barilla. The best type is when DH has time to make them fresh.

Di Martino makes Tesco Finest but not long one sadly
Sainsbury used to do it but haven’t seen it since lockdown

we bought Lucio Garofalo, blue pkt, six from Amazon on special offer
its 3.85£ atm same as Ocado.
We cook this, 10mins, in our proper pasta pan (Sainsbury £28. onoffer atm)
when we feeling ‘authentic’ or showing off

YEARS ago, we bought from the Italian deli on Maidenhead Bridge,
long, blue wrapped Macceroni, which was so fat and memorable
Ive never forgotten the pasta nor location,
sadly I’ve never seen it since -
the closest is Bucatini, which swells, that is good with home made sauce,
squashy Autumn tomatoes, fresh green garlic, sweet onions, simple, delicious.

Garlic Farm and Restaurant on the IoW, smoked garlic, all sorts of goodies

I actually evolved my hens from dinosaurs and dry my pasta in the vacuum of space. Anything else tastes disgusting.

Anyway, I don't normally taste the stuff because the sauce dominates.

With many things, there are no discernible differences between the supermarket own brand and actual brands, people only buy the brands because they psychologically believe them to be superior.

This isn’t the case for everything of course, there are clear differences between branded and non branded ketchup or cola for example. With something like dry pasta, I’d put money on them being made with the exact same ingredients and processes so it’s just different packaging.

Life is too short to stuff a mushroom, and same for making own pasta!

The medium range shops own brand is much the same as the cheaper branded. The smart price range is visibly different though as is the very high end. I buy a variety depending whether it's a quick mid week meal with a jar of tomato sauce or a nice home cooked with all quality ingredients

We’ve never paid for expensive pasta but the Roma one was on special recently and we got a few and two of the kids said it was nicer (I didn’t taste a difference)

@CertainUncertain gosh! thank you, now that IS fat!

thank you for your thoughtful post, I’m reading it all now -

I'm not convinced. Waitrose own brand pasta is not nice imo! Supermarket ketchup is fine.