My supermarket dash yielded more than 20 jars of pasta sauce, which I tasted hot with pasta. I included Bolognese sauce, although mostly only the ones that suggested on the label that they could be eaten without adding meat. Heinz was in there, of course – you can’t have missed its recent, hugely expensive launch, which has rattled the sauce cages, much as Loyd Grossman’s snapped at Dolmio’s heels when it appeared on the shelves in 1995. With pasta sauce, it’s every tomato for itself.

This is mellow and is on the sweet side, perhaps from the carrots used in the mix. It’s oddly gloopy, despite there being no starch listed as an ingredient, so maybe it’s from the starch in the carrots? As I am a big fan of his sauces, I have decided to give recipes and review on two of his most popular sauces, Tomato and Basil, and Tikka Masala. Very mellow. It tastes posh, if a little bit confected. Comes out mild when teamed with pasta; some nice lumps. No added sugar but still very rich – just a bit too heavy handed with the herbs to eat straight; better with meat. Shows promising lumps of tomato and cubes of carrot but there’s almost no flavour! Just a bitter afternote.Heat the oil in a pan and add the bacon. Cook for 4-5 minutes until the bacon is cooked. Add the pepper and cook for a further 2 to 3 minutes until the pepper is beginning to brown. Add the sauce and simmer gently until it has heat through. In another pan, add dry penne pasta to salted boiling water. When al dente, add to the sauce and mix through. Take off the heat and let stand for a minute. Stir through lots of torn basil leaves, top with grated parmesan and serve immediately. Quite a lot of tomato skin in this, and the sauce has a dried herb flavour while being quite sharp and vinegary. It tastes thin and metallic, not very balanced on its own, but could be good with very rich meat. Reference intakes are a form of guideline for energy (calories/kilojoules), sugar, fat, saturated fat and salt intakes. The guidelines were drawn up based on the idea that the average adult aged between 19 and 64 should eat no more than about 2,000 calories a day to stay healthy.

So, for example, the label on one pot of flavoured yoghurt shows that it has 8g saturated fat and 40 per cent of the reference intake. That’s because the reference intake for saturated fat is “no more than 20g” per day. So eat a full pot and you are 40 per cent of the way there. It might make you think twice about what else you eat that day.To be fair, it’s more than a dash of colour and flavour: tomatoes are high in lycopene, a powerful antioxidant that may lower the risk of stroke and some cancers, and ­cooking the tomatoes makes the lycopene much more “bioavailable”, ie easy to absorb. Most of our lycopene comes from tomato sauce, juice and tinned tomatoes, so for once there’s a benefit to a can or jar over fresh. Loyd Grossman's tomato and chilli sauce has 3 syns for 100g and 2.5 syns for their no-sugar version, making it a great low syn pasta sauce. Their tomato sauce with just basil on the slimming world has 3 syns for 100g. To be really thrifty, as some of my friends on social media have (rather severely) pointed out, surely you make your own? I gave it a go, using the cheapest tinned tomatoes, in my case Asda Just Essentials at 34p a can. I needed two tins – budget brands are a bit more watery, so they need cooking down a bit longer than the premium versions – to make enough sauce to fill a 440g jar.

Reference intakes are not intended to be targets so they are different from the old measure of “recommended daily allowance”. Reference intakes are simply meant to give you a clearer picture of how much you are eating. It’s a way of benchmarking. Add you are tomatoes and the passata then bring the mix to a boil and simmer for around half an hour, add in the basil and balsamic vinegar right at the end. Is Loyd Grossman Tomato And Chilli Sauce High In Syns? Can I Have Their Tomato Basil Sauce On Slimming World? Heat one tablespoon of the oil and fry the aubergines for approximately 6-8 minutes, or until brown on all sides. That’s why we go through a rigorous process to find the correct ingredients to create our sauces. We use Mediterranean tomatoes, ensuring they’re always the right colour, flavour and texture, and Sicilian Lemons, to lift flavour profiles for a fresher, more prominent taste.Made in Italy, and it delivers a good, intense, almost caramelised tomato flavour. It doesn’t taste that fresh, though, and there are some hard bits.