Taste test: La San Marzano canned tomatoes

La San Marzano tomatoes as they come out of the can. Look at that ripe red goodness!

After the Summer Fancy Food Show, the folks at La Regina di San Marzano sent me some product for testing. First up was this 28-oz can of Diced Tomatoes, which excited me because I hoped to replicate the yearly taste-off described in this NYT article about the legendary Frank Pepe’s in New Haven, CT.

Each September two grandsons of the founder taste the year’s crop of canned San Marzano, and choose a product to be used in its pizzas. This is important because Frank Pepe’s pizza sauce is nothing more than puréed tomatoes with just a bit of added salt. The cheese pizza gets a light coating of olive oil on the dough, then the sauce, then mozzarella and a sprinkling of parmesan. After a quick trip through their coal-fired ovens, the result is spectacular—chewy and bursting with ripe tomato flavor. Could we do as well using our sample tomatoes?

Our Frank Pepe-stye pizza made with La San Marzano tomatoes

I thought about running my San Marzanos through a food strainer to remove seeds and skin, but was dissuaded by a thread on the excellent Pizzamaking forum which suggests the best flavor lurks on the underside of the skin. In the end, I didn’t even purée it but just lathered the chunks onto a commercial dough which then got the same cheese toppings as Frank Pepe’s. I baked the pizza on a preheated sheet pan in a 550 degree oven, as hot as mine will go. The crust was just okay, but the toppings were delicious and the tomato flavor really came through. And any texture distraction from the skin and seeds had disappeared in the cooking, so no need to worry about that.

Contenders in our canned tomato taste test

I next did a taste comparison of the La San Marzano (their shortened name on the label) brand and two other canned tomatoes, Cento and Furmano. Cento is a premium brand which is frequently recommended to home cooks wanting to get the best San Marzano flavor. Furmano is a budget label often on sale in my red sauce-loving region. La San Marzano blew them both away. The flavor was more robust than the Cento and as might be expected the Furmano finished out of the running, whatever tomato essence it had masked by a heavy hand with basil, oregano and garlic. (There were a couple of generous basil stalks in my can of La San Marzano; they didn’t add anything to the flavor and were discarded before use.)

So who are these La San Marzano folks and where can you get their product? They are a family-owned operation, now in its third generation, which was founded before the San Marzano DOP certification existed and so are the only Italian company allowed to use the San Marzano name in their brand. (DOP certification, which stands for Denominazione di Origine Protetta, adds significantly to the cost of the product and they chose not to pursue it.)

San Marzano is a region of Italy, not a type of tomato; the tomatoes themselves are Romas, aka plum tomatoes, and their distinctive flavor comes from the terroir (in the foothills of Mt. Vesuvius) and growing methods. Thus the fabulous tomatoes I picked a few years ago at Mariquita Farms in California might have been grown in similar conditions, but they technically should not have been called San Marzanos.

As to where to buy, the short list from the company includes Kings, Acme, DeCicco, Brooklyn Fare, FoodCellar, and Price Chopper. Price Chopper is in the only name in my region and I haven’t been able to find the tomatoes (or their pasta sauce, which we’ll try next) in their stores. Fortunately, La San Marzano tomatoes and sauces are available on Amazon! There is a bit of a price bump to cover Prime shipping, as you would expect, but it’s a very affordable splurge. Go for it. I predict you’ll like these ripe red beauties on your own pizza or used in any recipe calling for canned tomatoes.