The Overpriced Type Of Pasta Sauce You Should Never Waste Your Money On

You can't go wrong serving pasta when you want to both please a crowd and make cooking dinner a quick and easy affair. If you've got the time and motivation, you can always make a sweeter homemade pasta sauce with famous Italian tomatoes. But if not, a store-bought stand-in is where it's at. You can even upgrade the flavor of jarred pasta sauce with minimal effort, but some products amount to a waste of hard-earned dough, such as truffle pasta sauce.

If you're someone who appreciates the complex flavor of these evasive mushrooms, you'll be sadly disappointed digging into most truffle pasta sauces. Typically, they don't contain any actual truffles. Instead, you might see truffle oil or truffle flavoring on the list of ingredients. Often these additives attempt to mimic the taste of the real thing with 2,4-dithiapentane, an engineered chemical flavoring scientists dreamed up to resemble the taste of truffles. Or, they include such a small amount of the mushroom that the taste wouldn't even be noticeable without the added chemical — this allows companies to market the sauces as having "real truffle" even though the flavor is severely lacking.

Genuine truffles are hailed as a culinary delicacy, boasting a subtle mosaic of earthy flavors and notes of garlic. The taste of the oil knockoff ranges from barely noticeable to obnoxiously overpowering, depending on how it was manufactured. Expecting an imitation truffle flavor to elevate a pasta sauce is undeniably misguided.

There are a few reasons that genuine truffles are generally not included in pasta sauce. The most obvious is the price. Some varieties of the mushroom command upwards of $900 per pound. Given how expensive they are, a jar of pasta sauce with real ones inside would be out of the average person's price range. There's no chance that a $10 jar of pasta sauce has ever been anywhere near a notable amount of genuine truffle. If you think that purchasing pasta sauce advertising the mushroom as a main component means you're in for a fancy treat, think again — you'll be dining on truffle oil.

Another practical reason store-bought pasta sauce usually doesn't contain truffles is that it would be a waste of an expensive ingredient. Whether used for flavoring or as a preservative, or both, jarred pasta sauce typically contains a fair amount of salt. If actual truffles were mixed in with that salt, it would dehydrate them. The sophisticated flavor they're famous for would be eliminated if that happened, leaving you with a bland imposter you grossly overpaid for.

As one might assume with the high price the mushrooms command, they aren't an ingredient that is widely available. Truffles cost so much because they're rare. They only grow in specific locations, and they're not easy to spot because they live underground. People employ trained pigs and dogs to locate them before they can be gently removed from their homes and carefully cleaned for sale. If you're looking for a full-on gourmet experience with your pasta, it's best to pony up for real truffles and shave some over the top.