3 Ways To Make Spaghetti Sauce

This is the first in our weekly series comparing three ways to accomplish common tasks by price and quality. Next Friday, we'll compare three ways of renting DVDs.

In most Italian homes, buying a jar of store-bought spaghetti sauce (Ragu, Prego, etc.) is like eating a Whopper on Good Friday. It just doesn't happen.

In other words, we make our own. Not that there's anything wrong with buying the jarred stuff (except that it's devoid of heart and/or flavor), but making it yourself can lead to huge savings.

The suggested retail price of a 28-ounce jar of Ragu is about $2.75. If you bought two jars a week for 52 weeks, that comes to $286. If you make it yourself with grocery store ingredients, the savings are substantial. The savings are more dramatic if you belong to a big box savings store and buy your ingredients there. For this article, I used prices at a local Sam's Club outlet.

My stovetop recipe calls for tomato puree, tomato paste, onions and cooking oil. I'm not going to go into spices because everyone flavors theirs a bit differently. And if you even had a hint of how mine is ultimately made, well, let's just say there would be problems within my "family."

As far as physical labor, making a kettle of spaghetti sauce takes about 30 minutes to prepare and at least four hours to cook (longer, if you have the patience. My dad used to cook it all night.)

But back to basics. Puree. Paste. Onions. Oil. Those are basic building blocks of this recipe. Let's take a look at them one-by-one.

Each kettle in my recipe makes six quarts of sauce. So if you factor that over a year, you only have to make 15 kettles to equal 104 jars of the 28-ounce store-bought stuff.

Tomato paste: 60 12-ounce cans at $1.50 each will cost you $90. If you buy the same equivalent at Sam's Club, it'll cost you $53.

Tomato puree: 30 29-ounce cans at $2 each will cost you $60. If you buy the equivalent at Sam's Club, it'll cost you $25.

Onions: The recipe calls for a one-half of a large onion. At 75 cents per onion, your grocery store cost is $5.63. Your Sam's Club cost (50 cents per onion), would be $3.75.

Cooking oil: The recipe calls for 4 ounces of oil per kettle. At grocery store prices, that would cost $11 for enough oil. At Sam's Club, you can get enough oil for all 15 kettles for $7.87.

That's it. Here's the grand total for a year's supply of spaghetti sauce:

Ragu (two jars a week): $286
Make it yourself, with ingredients from a local grocery store: $166.63
Make it yourself, with ingredients from Sam's Club: $89.68

That means with some smart shopping and a little labor, you could save between $120 and $200 a year ... just on spaghetti sauce.

Make it yourself? It's a chore, sure. But the savings in this particular case add up quickly.