What hill are you willing to die on?

Agreed, taste > authentic tradition. We all have different taste buds.

Exactly why pineapple DOES belong on pizza

I have never, ever, even considered adding sugar to my homemade tomato sauce. Then again, I militantly read all nutritional labels for added sugars and do what I reasonable can to avoid them. As Beantowner wrote: to each his own. I LOVE pineapple on pizza (with ham and bacon).

I was once comparing homemade pasta recipes with a colleague. I told him that I had narrowed down the best red wine to add to spaghetti sauce as Merlot. It blew his mind. He had never considered adding red wine to a red sauce. He told me his secret ingredient was to add a bit of vanilla extract to his spaghetti sauce. I love vanilla. I add it to anything even remotely sweet. I whipped up a new batch of sauce that weekend and added the vanilla. The end result? Pretty fucking awful.

Not necessarily to add sugar to make gravy (spaghetti sauce with meat).
Although I worked at a great authentic pizza place run by old-school Italians and they put a lot of sugar in their pizza sauce.
Pizza’s ok occasionally, but it’s not good to eat too often. It’s really not good for you.

Hard disagree on this one Motörhead. Especially with sauce. I never add sugar to ANYTHING. When it’s in my coffee by accident I turn around and take it back, it’s UNDRINKABLE. Sweet tea, WTF is that shit. I don’t know how people do it.

I would recommend to those that like adding sugar, you might be drinking soda/soft drinks with tons of added sugar. Some of these drinks have 100g in a bottle. Cut that out of your diet entirely. Your pallet will change and you’ll start thinking most crap food is too damn sweet. It’d be a great health/lifestyle upgrade. I’m always drinking seltzer I got like 15 cases of Schweppes Original the other day. Just carbonated water.

There is no such thing as a real Italian sauce that contains sugar. The only, only time you would use it would be if you fuck up and add too much salt. A little sugar will cancel out some.

Wasn't there a scam over San Marzano tomatoes a few years ago? Most tomatoes labeled that way in the U.S. were not actually San Marzano tomatoes?

I'm not a fan of sugar in spaghetti sauce. I've noticed it's something the Cuban girls seem to like, but hadn't really noticed before then. It's not something I'd judge someone over, and it's not like I'd spit it out if I ate it. But I don't like it.

But really I'm commenting to agree with Muddy's comment about soda. I don't take a hard line on no sugar in anything, but drinking soda regularly does seem to numb your pallet to sweetness. Cutting out soda and allowing some time to recalibrate totally changes things. Drink a glass of sweet tea before you cut out soda, then drink another one with the same amount of sugar after going a few weeks with no soda and you'll be shocked. And it totally impacts everything you eat, you start noticing sweetness in tons of other foods and foods designed to be sweet aren't nearly as appealing.

I can't jump on board with the seltzer drinking, but 100% agree about the soda part.

Authentic = bullshit. Recipes change constantly as tastes evolve. Your great grandmother’s gravy would have tasted bland and basic af by your standards today. Same probably goes for her great grandmother.

I still make gravy using my great grandmother's recipe. Chocolate chip cookies too. I do agree that authentic means very little since to me it's all about taste. Example: Real Poutine has duck in it. I know one place within 50 miles that gets it.

If the tomatoes are sweet enough sugar isn't needed. Sugar can help if the tomatoes are too sour

My great value tomato basil garlic pasta sauce from Walmart has 6 grams of sugar in the 24 oz bottle (680 g). Excellent flavor especially with my spicy Italian sausage meatballs.

Lol I thought you asking a legit question about *our* hill, and here you guys are trading recipes.

That people who think Trump is going to save the country are too stupid to be allowed to vote.

That people who think Harris is going to save the country are too stupid to be allowed to vote.

People who bring politics into a debate about adding sugar to pasta sauces are too stupid to e allowed to vote

The title asks a question. I answered it.

So did I.

i later read the label of the spaghetti pasta sauce more carefully and i made a mistake earlier. there are 5 servings in the 24oz (680 g) bottle. so 6 grams sugar per serving. total of 30 grams sugar for the bottle. about 6% roughly. ( i’m not good at math...) that’s a lot of sugar.

Naturally occuring sugar is not as bad. Tomato, a fruit, has fructose. Milk has lactose. Beer has maltose (from being filtered through molasses - so not as natural). Naturally occurring sugars are part of a balanced diet and something our bodies have evolved to tolerate and metabolize. The problem is "added sugars." These are everywhere from salad dressings to bread. This is what you should be looking for on nutritional labels and seeking to eliminate or reduce as much as possible. Artificial sweeteners - aspartame, stevia, splenda, alcohol sugars- should all be avoided as well. I believe our FDA is far too lenient with what they allow food manufacturers to add to our food in pursuit of profit.

@ski: technically I also use one of my great grandmothers recipes (picadillo) as well, so you've got me there. On a related note I recently went on a deep dive of jambalaya recipes. The earliest mentions are in the mid 19th century, and while they vary wildly, they're mostly just stewed chicken with rice and whatever leftovers thrown in. There is one from thar period made with bear: inadvisable. The spices we think of as being basic in jambalaya weren't used until later. I bought Paul Prudhomme's famous collection of cajun recipes from the 1980's, and cooked his jambalaya... bland! At least by what I think a reasonable amount of spice is today. My kids eat hot Cheetos... way too hot for us kids back in the 1970s, but now its baseline spicy for a new generation. 100 years from now Americans will be eating scotch bonnets on their (avocado) toast every morning...