I’m a big fan of making my own tomato sauce (we called it gravy in my Italian-American family) to have with whole wheat pasta. Almost any prepared sauce from a store, be it jarred or canned, will be loaded with salt.
Look for the low-salt canned tomatoes when making your own, though, usually any San Marzano tomato will be lower in salt than no-name varieties, as I’ve written before. That said, I was surprised to find a new variation on canned tomatoes at our local Valli Produce.
As you can see, the can calls them “Extra Heavy Crushed Tomatoes.” I thought that was just marketing hype until I opened them. They were really thick, more like a tomato paste than crushed tomatoes.
I mixed four cans of them with four cans of regular tomatoes to make a really thick, rich gravy, so thick we actually added a bit of water when reheating it for a second meal to thin it out a bit.
The label shows a can of these has 260 mgs of salt, so my four cans had 1,040 mgs of sodium. That lasted three meals, for two people, so it’s well within my salt tolerance of 1,500 mgs a day.
I’m not sure how widely distributed these are, the U.S. distributor seems to be in New Jersey, so you could try checking with them for more information on where to buy them.
John
The No Salt, No Fat, No Sugar Journal 