To think that sauces from jars are much nicer than homemade?

[Satine5]

Or am I just a rubbish cook? I don't buy ready meals, but I can't get over my love of ready made sauces. As hard as I try, a can of chopped tomatoes and herbs are never as nice as a jar of good old loyd grossman bolognese sauce. What am I doing wrong? Same with hummus- I tried making my own and it was vile!

As well as all of the above, you need to add about half a tube of tomato puree. Really thickens the sauce up nicely .

Get the cheapest you can - pretty much all purees are the same

Soup maker is my favourite kitchen item, shove everything in, heat, add toms and passata, cook a bit klonger. Ad basil. Blend It take 20mons to cook and as long as it takes to chop an onion to prepare. Can't be doing with pan to blender and back to pan slops

Ohand having a chilli sauce and then adding cream at the end is fantastic. But until I got the soup maker making pasta sauce was such a faff

stealth great idea- I have a soup maker but never thought to make pasta sauce in it! I know what I'll be doing this weekend- batch cooking pasta sauce!

I use the garlic in a tube too, I used to use the ginger but have switched to frozen now, Waitrose Cooks Ingredients, all sorts of herbs, lemongrass, ginger etc all chopped and ready to use from the freezer, a really useful standby.

Sweet and sour is easy too, just put in a pan 9tbsp ketchup, 3 tbsp vinegar, 4 tbsp brown sugar, 2 cloves worth of garlic tube, cook till the sugar is dissolved and just bubbling.

I find Pataks curry pastes very useful though, not the sauces.

Some good ideas on this thread, I never thought of putting a stock cube in pasta sauce.

Makes good Rogan josh paste as well!

I find Lloyd sauces awful, they taste of nothing! Now give me some chopped tomatoes, sundried tomatoes, onion, garlic, paprika, herbs and simmered down with anchovies, perfect pasta sauce

I think they taste, but are so oily.
Quite like the seeds of change ones and don't mind the dolmio ones

YANBU. I'm a rubbish cook so jars are much nicer :) It's a rare (nonexistent) occasion when there's a chance to hand-pick herbs, spices and ripe tomatoes from one's (again, nonexistent) kitchen garden, and simmer them gently for a few hours while you make fresh pasta by hand

We often have the remains of a jar of salsa around - I throw it in after the onions & before I add the tin of tomatoes, gives a bit of extra depth to the sauce and means it's not hanging around the fridge until I throw it out

YANBU

Theres no way I would mess around making sauces from scratch for just me and a 2 year old or just me.

I will use jars as it is easier and I like them

My hubby is a chef and loves to make his own sauces from scratch. He's taught me a trick or 2 as well! If you add the right thickening agents and flavourings you can get a really good, rich sauce!

I make my tomato sauce exactly the same way you do PoppadumPreach. I find that it is the initial slow cooking of the onion that intensifies the end flavour. Although I find that half an hour gives as good a result.

I love cooking and have lots of recipe books, and generally find jarred sauces have a nasty, acrid aftertaste, especially the LG ones (sorry Satine5).

I do use Sacla pesto and always have a jar of Pataks curry paste on the go though.

Yanbu at all to think this.

For me money comes into why I cook with jars a lot. By the time you havebought all the seperate ingredients and spent money on a bottle of wine, jars of herbs blah blah then you may as well buy the damn sauce for a quid and quite often it tastes better than my poor offerings!

I did make chilli completely from scratch the other week though quite cheaply in fact and it was very very nice, much better than the sauce in the jars!

With regards to the price of herbs - I agree they are expensive, it's well worth growing your own, or if you're making pesto I always buy a massive bunch from the market - if you bought that amount from supermarket i think it'd be about £20!

I know what you mean too. I'm a rubbish cook and don't have lots of time after work either, so things like jarred sauces with mince are easy for me. Also I live alone so it seems like so much effort to cook for one, and then I get out of the habit. (very small freezer compartment).

Besides pasta sauces, I also buy those things in M&S that have the uncooked meat, plus sauce.

I really like the ginger and soy sauce that comes with the salmon. And there's a pork fillet one that has a nice apples/cream/brandy sauce. And Waitrose used to do a delicious stroganoff sauce with beef.

I would like to learn to make any of those myself, if they were quick and didn't then involve having tons of leftover ingredients afterwards, but it always seems to.

Making tom sauce from scratch is much cheaper than jars, i use dried herbs i prefer the flavour of dried to fresh, dried herbs cost about 60p and last months and do countless dishes, same with garlic and herb puree 30p each and last a fortnight for me and i do about 3 tom based dishes per week so thats in your cupboard already, all you need new at each meal is a tin of toms you can get for 30p (i buy napolina ones on offer though usually when they are £1.90 for 4 at morrisons) and an onion for about 8p

It's not that much hassle making sauce for say just one toddler though and is cheaper.

I generally make a large batch. Freeze into those silicone ice cube trays then when frozen transfer to a freezer bag. Can then just grab a couple of cubes and thaw in pan / microwave if only cooking for a little one.

The same for cheese sauce/ parsley sauce etc..

With 2 under 2 cooking everyday from scratch can be hard. I'm also rubbish at meal planning. So doing this saves my butt half the week!

Can also hide lots of veg for a fussy eater

Can you freeze White/cheese/parsley sauces?

Yes you can.

Yes you can :) I basically make large pan of white sauce, then freezing some like that, make a bit into parsley sauce, then add cheese in remainder so make 3 sauces v quickly that way.

Said above I freeze in silicone ice cube trays. Actually now if more to basic cupcake/ muffin silicone trays for freezing stuff then poping out as a bit bigger. Plus no faffing.

Same with tomato sauce, make a large pan, then add roasted peppers to part and blitz, maybe courgettes in another. So would just roast random veg whilst sauce is cooking then separate. I prob make various tomato sauces once a month, same with white sauce bases. So actually only involves cooking twice over a month for them. Make during nap time

YABU & need more cookery practice!

It's false economy to say that all the ingredients for a certain sauce cost too much so I'll get a jar for a quid.

Once you get all the ingredients, you then have store cupboard ingredients to make the sauce or variations of many times over, whereas your jar is single use and full of god knows what.

My store cupboard always has the appropriate ingredients to make white sauce (fat, flour & milk, white wine (ok I would have to get that specially as it's usually drunk), stock, herbs etc etc), tomato sauce (tinned tomatoes, puree, salt, pepper sugar, herbs, onions and anything else you want to add, maybe oxo and worcester sauce) and any sort of stew sauce (the basis of which is usually fat, flour and stock). You can make any sauce from a whole host of basic ingredients. Just practice!

YABU

Sauce from jars are yuck. Also the idea of giving any money to Loyd Grossman gives me the heebie jeebies. Can't stand the man. Weren't his sauces poisoning people earlier this year?

I like Pataks spice pastes though, they make a really good base for a curry.