FRENCH JARRED RED SAUCE REVIEWS

the only important research i did in my 6 month trip, dissertation be damned

As anyone who has ever lived with me or been to my apartment knows, I am a veritable connoisseur¹ of jar pasta sauce. In my first two apartments, I displayed a collection of sauce containers along the tops of my cupboards as a sign of my conquest and culture. In my current space in the US (and my much smaller apartment in Paris) there isn’t really room for this sort of frivolity, so I’m just recycling the jars. Of course, like any good Italian, I prefer to make my own red sauce, but, like any good Italian, I’m also kinda lazy.

The problem of jar sauce in the United States is functionally solved. Carbone or Rao’s, it’s just that shrimple. These are the sauces worth purchasing. All others are to be discarded or purchased only in the event of severe need - either extremely poor financial straits or a simple lack of other options combined with a dire need for marinara, gravy, red sauce, ragu, whatever you might call it. However, in my attempt to discern if the same question was already answered by a sauce scholar studying these perverse Gallic provinces, I came up empty.² As Gandhi once said, be the change you want to see in the world. At the end of this 6 month research trip, I will have built a comprehensive catalog of red sauces (probably overwhelmingly in the arrabbiata category, as this is my preferred type of jar sauce)³ for the use of future sauce scholars. I will include both things added to the sauce as well as the pasta eaten alongside it for posterity. Assume all sauce is eaten with parmesan cheese and red pepper flakes unless otherwise specified.

URSINI - ARRABBIATA

Things added: Spinach, mushrooms, garlic, Keret’s brand Harrissa
Pasta eaten with: Barilla penne rigate⁴

While the flavor of this sauce was good, it was altogether too thin. No amount of effort or assistance would have ever allowed it to cling to the pasta. This was closer to a soup than a sauce. I’m sure the moisture from the mushrooms contributed to this issue, but not to the extent I experienced. Penne were drowning in sauce like sailors after a shipwreck. The bottle was also small, as you can probably see above (human hand for scale, it is my hand, if you know how large my hands are). It just barely enough sauce for two servings (and that’s WITH the inclusion of spinach and mushrooms), though I also know I eat a lot of pasta.⁵ I didn’t have this one with red pepper flakes because I forgot to buy them and I had to cook the spinach and mushrooms in a pot instead of a pan because my landlord’s pans didn’t work with her newly-installed induction oven. Even with the harissa, this sauce was not very spicy at all, but the flavor of the tomatoes was otherwise good. This is also an indictment of the harissa. At the very least, it wasn’t sweet, which is the great failure of most American jar sauces.

Ursini is, from what I can tell, an Italian company from the southern Italian province of Abruzzo. They began as a collective of olive farmers. I know nothing of their politics or positioning, but I’ve never seen their sauce in America, so I don’t think they export it outside the EU (or at least, not outside the EU and its nearby regions). Olive oil still seems to be their main drag, but their sauce is at least decent.

Rating: 7/10 (maybe if I put tomato paste in it, it’d become a sauce?)

BARILLA - ARRABBIATA

Things added: jack shit, fuck all
Pasta eaten with: Franprix store brand 3-cheese ravioli

What a fucking disaster. While the problems with this meal were not entirely the fault of the sauce (one of the three cheeses in this 3-cheese ravioli was Not a cheese you should put in ravioli), the blame overwhelmingly lies at its feet. The ravioli were edible on their own, which could not be said about them while in the sauce. I knew there was likely to be a problem when I opened the jar and SMELLED it, but didn’t want to throw it out after I’d spent good Euros buying it. Despite that, it ended up in the trash, almost entirely uneaten.

For one, this is not by any measure an arrabbiata. It is not spicy. It is not garlicky, even. Even the tomatoes, which one would hope would be the dominant flavor in the absence of these other arrabbiata ingredients, are playing second, maybe even third, fiddle. There are two major flavors in this: unknown chemical and red bell pepper. Neither of these are flavors that one wants in their sauce. I’m not sure if the red bell pepper was in there as a substitute for the actual spicy peppers for which arrabbiata is known, or to give it the unnaturally bright red color it seems to possess. Neither are acceptable excuses for putting bell peppers in pasta sauce. Oh, and did I mention that it’s also somehow sweet? Why is this happening to me? Barilla is owned by insane Italian fascists, so I try to avoid buying their products. However, I purchased both this sauce and the Barilla pastas that will be appearing throughout these reviews on my first full day in Paris in a Carrefour City that I mistakenly believed was a grocery store when it is actually more of an oversized convenience store.⁶ As such, my choices were limited, and, as we all know, I cannot live without pasta. However, as a result of my misfortune, we all now know that the fascists didn’t secretly produce an incredible jar pasta sauce. No, rather, they produced vile, inedible slop. Unlike the previous sauce, it at least comes in a respectably sized jar, which would be good if the contents within could be charitably described as “food.”

Oh, and I didn’t take a picture of the jar myself cause I was too busy ridding the apartment of the sauce before the smell baked into the walls and furniture, so a stock photo ripped from the Barilla website will have to do.

Rating: -4/10 (thrown out after like 4 bites, -1 point for each bite)

RUMMO - ARRABBIATA

Things added: Mushrooms, spinach, garlic, merguez sausage, Le Phare du Cap Bon brand harissa, splash of red wine to deglaze the pan (yes I have a pan now)
Pasta eaten with: Eataly mushroom ravioli

This sauce is, like, pretty good. It’s a solid pasta sauce. Not too thin, not too sweet, no weird chemical aftertaste of preservatives or unknown intrusion of an enemy bell pepper. It’s solid. I would settle for this sauce if no other sauce was available. It also isn’t really anything to write home about. For one, it is simply not an arrabbiata sauce. It’s a good basic pomodoro red sauce, but there’s nothing angry about this sauce. It’s not spicy at all without the harissa, and I didn’t add a ton of that because I wasn’t sure on its flavor either (thankfully, when mixed into the sauce, the flavor I was unsure of disappeared).

I have to also be entirely clear that this sauce probably received both benefits and detriments that were entirely out of its control. Firstly, the mushroom ravioli were incredibly good and increased the quality of the meal excessively. Would I have been so content with this sauce with a simple penne? However, while I like merguez sausage, I don’t think I like them in a red sauce. Once I realized that, though, I just stopped eating them and they didn’t noticeably impact the flavor of the overall dish. There is also a slight aftertaste of merguez and the less acceptable bits of the harissa still lingering, so they may have had some sort of effect on the overall experience I wasn’t directly aware of while eating. I may have to return to this sauce with a more simple, traditional pairing and give it another rating.⁷ This sauce does have enough for more than one serving - but don’t be deceived by the label. It says 4 servings, this is clearly only enough for 2, at least if you eat pasta with the gusto that I do.

Like Barilla, Rummo is an old, family-owned Italian business. They’ve started selling their pastas in America as well (though I’ve yet to see their sauces on the shelves), perhaps in the hopes of unseating Barilla. Their pastas are, in my opinion, of a higher quality than Barilla, as are their sauces (though almost any pasta sauce would be of higher quality than the trash Barilla slings). In 2010, they received an award for having reduced their carbon emissions by 30% by building a new, modern plant for pasta-making. That’s good too!

The quality of the Eataly ravioli is also a major win and a lesson for me. For those unaware, Eataly is a chain of Italian-goods import stores that also have Italian restaurants in them. In a way, they’re somewhat similar to an Italian H-Mart. They tend to set up in major cities (and a town called King of Prussia in Pennsylvania, for some reason) around the world. I have historically avoided Eataly because, for lack of a better reason, it has a stupid name. Eataly is a really stupid name.⁸ However, I think my time in France is going to force me to reckon with the fact that sometimes good things have stupid names. Stupid names are overwhelmingly common here. I live near a part of Paris called Beauborg (itself kind of a stupid name, meaning literally Beautiful Town) in which there are two restaurants called Cafe Paris Beauborg and Beauborg Cafe right across the street from each other. These are stupid names. Nonetheless, I will start going to Eataly more often, and perhaps the quality of sauce and also pasta will improve.

Rating: 7.5/10 (would be an 8 if this was actually arrabbiata)

DECARLO - ARRABBIATA

Things added: jack shit, fuck all
Pasta eaten with: mushroom and truffle ravioli of a brand I forgot to write down

I bought this arrabbiata and one other on one of my first trips to Eataly, as well as the ravioli. To give credit where credit is due, DeCarlo is the first arrabbiata I’ve eaten over here that is actually an arrabbiata. It was very spicy, which is good! Unfortunately, I think they used a different sort of pepper than the one I’m used to getting in Italian-American arrabbiata, and I didn’t like it as much. The sauce was also a bit too chunky for my liking, I don’t really want big honking rectangular prisms of tomato floating around in there. The flavor of the spicy pepper was also the primary, overwhelming flavor by quite an extreme margin. There was no real evidence of tomato, garlic, or olive oil as far as I could taste. As such, while I think this sauce would be a win for someone who liked this kind of pepper (I couldn’t determine which one from the packaging), it isn’t for me. There’s enough sauce for two servings here, but I won’t be eating the second. I threw out the jar. I did, however, finish what I’d made for the night, so it was still edible, even if it wasn’t my favorite.

I also ate this as an illness meal when I was heavily congested after acquiring some brand of Gallic Plague.⁹ There’s a chance that impacted my ability to taste things accurately. I also wasn’t the hugest fan of these ravioli.

DeCarlo, like Ursini, seem to be primarily in the olive oil business. They claim to have been in business since 1600, though I have some doubts that the modern company can actually provide evidence they’re truly the direct descendant of the 17th century administrative organ.

Rating: 5/10

RIOFLI SAPORI - ARRABBIATA

Things added: jack shit, fuck all
Pasta eaten with: Mushroom and asiago tortellini of a brand I forgot to write down

Another strike-out. This sauce had basically the same problems as the one above but even more amplified. That strange flavor was brought ever-more to the forefront, that Bad Pepper taste. It also wasn’t super spicy, but I also barely ate any before I threw it out and made ramen instead. The ramen was fine.

Before I began writing this review, I was fairly concerned about the state of pasta sauce in France. Is it really this bad? How many more of these will I have to eat before I find something edible? Are the best options really the Rummo and Ursini sauces? Is it really worth the financial strain of buying all this sauce I mostly won’t eat just for a series of reviews that makes me no money?

Then I looked up Riolfi Sapori and learned it was a fucking grocery store. They were selling STORE BRAND ARRABBIATA IN THE FUCKING ITALIAN IMPORT STORE??? It seems like they specialize in jarred and canned goods, but still.

I also think I have to make a fateful decision. I have to stop buying arrabbiata, at least for now. Whatever peppers they’re using taste Wrong to me, maybe if I’d grown up eating the arrabbiata they sell here, I’d be okay with it, but as it stands, they are not edible. I will continue my search in other varieties of sauce and maybe if I find a brand I really, truly, fully trust, I will attempt to buy their arrabbiata.

Rating: 1/10

ITALIANAVERA - SCIUE’ SCIUE’

Things added: mushrooms, garlic¹⁰
Pasta eaten with: Barilla penne rigate

We have a round 1 winner folks. Sciue’ sciue’ is what we in America would call a tomato basil sauce, from everything I can tell. Italianavera sciue’ sciue’ is highly edible, not too thin, and has a nice, deep red color. Not only that, it isn’t full of weird tomato chunks! After my despairing in the last review, this is truly a gift from the gods of sauce. It’s very basil forward, and in fact my only real complaint is that it might even be a little TOO basil forward. This is an incredibly solid sauce, not better than anything I can get at home, but a choice I can reliably return to. There was even a bit of sauce leftover for me to eat tomorrow!

I couldn’t find anything about the company Italianavera - they don’t appear to have a page on wikipedia (get on that, sauce enthusiast wiki editors) and the “about” page on their website just links to this image:

I mean, yeah, sure. That is, I guess, in an abstract sense, what they are “about.”

Rating: 7.5/10

ITALIANAVERA - NAPULE E’

Things added: Italian sausage
Pasta eaten with: Afeltra Rotini/Fusilli

Following up on the success of Italianavera in the realm of tomato basil, I wanted to see if they could continue the streak. This “slightly spicy” sauce is the closest thing to an arrabiatta of theirs in the store at the time, so I tried it with a degree of trepidation. I don’t normally believe in eating a spiral-shaped pasta with red sauce, morally, but I was out of other kinds of pasta unexpectedly. In many ways, this meal skirted horrendous failure. The tortellini I was originally going to eat tasted weird and I had to throw them out. I dropped a spatula and sent red sauce flying everywhere. The italian sausage was mid. But none of that matters. This sauce, with a bit of red pepper flakes added and cooked in the same pan as the sausage, was glorious. It’s the best so far. Fresh off a round 1 victory, I am almost willing to declare round 2 already complete. There is a chance this will simply become my sauce of choice.

If presented with this brand in an American grocery store, I would not purchase it over my favored brands, however. Nonetheless, here, we have a truly high quality sauce. Bravo, Italianavera.

Rating: 8.5/10

ITALIANAVERA - ARRABBIATA

Things added: Mushrooms, spinach
Pasta eaten with: De Cecco Rigatoni

It’s actually been quite some time since I wrote the last of these reviews, I made my own sauce in the interim and it was so resoundingly Actually Good that it made it hard to go back to the jar slop.

Maybe the greatest let down so far here. After two very respectable showings from Italianavera, their arrabbiata was a disappointment. Though it was only minorly plagued with that strangely off-flavor often common in Euro-jarrabbiata, that’s mostly because it didn’t have much flavor to speak of at all. It was edible, I ate it, but I didn’t finish my serving and I won’t be keeping the leftovers. Despite Napule ‘E being “leggermente piccante” and this one being “piccante,” the Napule ‘E definitely tastes more like it has hot pepper in it. What are we doing here folks?

I should add that my rating may be in part influenced by the fact that Rigatoni is a highly mid pasta shape that I always think I’ll like more than I actually do. But that wouldn’t add flavor back to this sauce. Rao’s, Carbone, I miss you…

Rating: 6/10

SIDEBAR! QUICK RATINGS!

When I made the above sauce, I also tested two others that I ended up not making because they were bad.

Familgia Crispino - Peperocino

I didn’t have a Tall Tube like the one above, mine was short, but one taste of this shit told me it had that nasty ass weird pepper flavor and I just threw it out. No reason to poison myself on purpose.

Rating: 0/10

A FENNEL ONE - I don’t know

The other one I didn’t take a picture of and can’t find anywhere, but it’s a sauce with “wild fennel.” Suffice to say it tasted exclusively like fennel, to the point that it was obviously inedible and was also chucked. If you are ever in France buying pasta sauce and see one that says it has wild fennel, just assume it’s this one and don’t buy it.

Rating: 0/10

Both of these sauces were thrown out before I could remember to take pictures, which is why the Crispino one has an image from the website and the second one has none at all (because there is no evidence it exists on the internet, did I dream this sauce? did this really happen?)

FAMIGLIA CRISPINO - Cipolla Rossa

Things added: jack shit, fuck all
Pasta eaten with: De Cecco Festonati¹¹

You may be surprised to see another Crispino sauce after how quickly their Peperoncino was discarded, but I’ve learned you can’t judge a Euro jar sauce brand by their spicy sauce. It’s definitely not because I bought these sauces at the same time and wanted to use them before I flew home. Anyways, whatever the reason, which we may never know for sure, I’m glad I tried this sauce because it was actually quite good. Cipolla Rossa refers to red onions, and I suppose there was slightly more onion flavor in this sauce than a normal one, but not incredibly so. Mostly, it just tasted like a good, simple pomodoro sauce, and that’s a glorious thing. No odd flavors, but also nothing particularly to write home about. I would absolutely buy this again, and I think it holds its own against the best other sauces I’ve eaten on this side of the Atlantic. There was even some sauce leftover for me to eat tomorrow! The main reason I probably wouldn’t buy this over my usual picks in the US is that I do, in the end, prefer an arrabbiata.

Familgia Crispino is a fairly new name on the jarred Italian goods scene, having only been founded in 1977. Compared to some of the others in here, some of which have pedigrees stretching back to the Early Modern period, if their own corporate records are to be believed, that’s practically yesterday. Their marketing certainly reflects modern sensibilities, all their stuff has a very sleek vibe to it and their website is fairly bespoke compared to some others I’ve seen. In particular, they specialize in Calabrian products and make their positioning in Calabria an important part of their corporate identity and marketing.

Rating: 8.5/10

I’m back in the US now!

My sauce quest, certainly the most important aspect of my journey abroad, is complete. Overall, I would say the jar sauce scene in France is worse than that in the US, and certainly more fraught. The Crispino Cipolla Rossa, Italianavera sauces, except the arrabbiata, the Ursini, and the Rummo are definitely the best of the bunch. I hope that future sauce scholars and foreign travelers can make use of this surely invaluable resource and have a better, easier time making delicious pasta in strange and distant lands than I did.

Whatever you do, don’t buy Barilla…subscribe for more important research…

1. See how that word is french? I was in France when I wrote that. It’s not a loan word or anything. Don’t lie to me.

2. All my searches were in English, of course, which could have been part of the problem. However, I choose to reject this reality and instead claim to be a daring trailblazer.

3. Oh, how little I knew when I wrote this fateful line…

4. The best pasta shape. You will see more penne rigate in this post.

5. Source: I ate both servings the same night.

6. Now that I am further along, I have come to realize that Parisian grocery stores are just kinda bad. I don’t think this is a Carrefour City problem.

7. I did not do that. Sorry folks!

8. Their website clarifies that “Eataly” stands for “Eating Italian.” Wow, I never would’ve guessed!

9. It’s the common cold.

10. This pasta was also supposed to have spinach but I bought the wrong leafy green at the store because I wasn’t paying attention. I actually do know the French word for Spinach off the top of my head, it’s Epinard. I remember it because I read it as Espinard, which is what I feel like Spongebob Squarepants would be named if he was from Alsace-Lorraine.

11. I have to make a brief sidebar here to warn you about Festonati, an incredibly fun-looking pasta shape that is unfortunately somewhat impractical and holds sauce poorly. A shame!