The Secret To Buying Quality Pasta Sauce, According To Chef Fabio Viviani

Just like the dating world after the invention of the internet and rise of social media, the grocery store is a place where there are seemingly endless options. As if you didn't have enough trouble swiping through the 100 single people in your area and choosing the ones that you could possibly hang out with for at least one date, now, at the grocery store, you're faced with a similar conundrum in the pasta sauce aisle. It sometimes has us wishing for simpler times, when there were only a few brands of jarred pasta sauce and you could swiftly move on with your day. Now, you spend what feels like an eternity scanning prices, ingredients, and packaging to find the "best" one.

It doesn't sound like the most important decision, but when you come home after a long day and need to shove as much pasta in your face as possible, bad sauce just won't make the cut. Also, those of us who grew up on Chef Boyardee, which Eat This, Not That! rightfully ranked as one of the unhealthiest canned foods, would prefer not to be re-traumatized by a high fructose-filled sauce. The Campbell's SpaghettiOs generation (not to be confused with the Franco-American SpaghettiOs generation, which started back in 1965) is all grown up now and wants a higher quality pasta sauce. Luckily, we don't have to do the research ourselves, chef Fabio Viviani is here to help.

Celebrity chef and founder of JARS by Fabio Viviani has solidified himself as an authority on Italian cuisine. Although his hospitality empire includes concepts that expand beyond the food of his home country, he still has strong opinions when it comes to how Italian recipes should be executed. He told Insider that he prefers to use canned tomatoes in his pasta sauce, because you can make great sauce outside of peak tomato season. The chef was clearly raised on homemade tomato sauce, but in a pinch, there are a few different brands of sauces from the grocery store he recommends.

"Go with some people that have done it for their whole lives," Viviani told Mashed in an exclusive interview. "Some good brand, whether it's Rao's, or whether it's Lucini or Barilla, Buitoni, things that [the] company, whether they're small or big, they are known for that kind of sauce." When you search through the jarred sauce rankings on the internet, Rao's often comes up as the number one pick, according to chefs and home cooks alike (via New York Magazine). Viviani does add, however, that at the end of the day, it comes down to personal preference. "Some of my friends, they love Prego sauce," said Viviani. "Which is pretty funny to me, but, hey, you know what, they like it... Whatever makes you happy. I buy the Italian stuff." Buon appetito, indeed.