your bucatini dish sounds lovely. For me, spaghetti and meatballs or sausage is a constant favorite and it’s what I enjoy cooking and eating. With all the fancy delicious pasta meals I’ve had at restaurants, I still prefer spaghetti and meatballs. Despite making my own marinara sauce with canned DOP Marzano whole tomatoes, I’ve recently discovered and loved the Rao brand way too much.

I’ll chop fresh organic cilantro to make a chimichurri sauce or pico de Gallo, both just sauces for dipping, yet for my favorite spaghetti and meatballs entree, I’m using dried pasta, jarred rao sauce, and preformed packaged raw meatballs. And yes, a favorite supper would be a grilled steak with a side of spaghetti marinara (no meatballs needed). I’m a total degen.

Rao is definitely the best of the jarred sauces. Used to only be available in the NYC metro area, but has gone wider in recent years.

Selling at that little store, Costco, would be considered a little wider...

I love a good pasta with meatballs or spicy Italian sausage. Some good Pecorino Romano over it is even better. Never tried the Rao sauce. Seems it’s twice as expensive as the other stuff Costco sells, but I might have to try it.

When they first expanded beyond the NYC metro area, I could only find Rao's in Wegman's. Now, they seem to be in every grocery store.

That said, years ago, I stumbled onto 10-15 jars of it at a sale our local natural foods warehouse hosts to benefit Relay for Life. They take customer returns (i.e., a case was damaged during shipment, so the customer returned it, and 11 of the 12 jars were not damaged) and sell them at incredibly low price points. The "damaged" goods are accumulated throughout the year and they usually host two or three sales each year. One year, I was able to snag several jars of Rao's sauces for between $0.50-$2/jar. Other great finds included packages of Biscoff cookies (those that sell for $2.50/package at Target and Walmart), for $0.50/package, 20 lb. bags of premium dog food for $10/bag, and cases of DaVinci penne for between $1-$6/case, depending on what time it was. It started out at $6/case, but as the day and sale progressed, they eventually dropped the price to $1/case. I bought one case at $6, and then bought another 3 or 4 cases at $1/case.

Agreed entirely - and some of the pea or lentil based pastas are particularly good with light but flavoursome sauces, since you need to overcome their stronger initial flavours. Tonight I'm having a green lentil pasta with Puttanesca sauce which I'm really looking forward to.

Having said that, I find basic spaghetti goes well with pretty well any good sauce and, combined with a good Bolognese, it can't be beat. All the comments upthread about meatballs with spaghetti I find very odd - it seems an odd combination and one I've only seen in the USA and never tried.

When we moved to IN from CT a year ago, I expected not to be able to find two of the my most important cooking ingredients: 1) Rao's marinara sauce; and 2) Polly-O Whole Milk Mozzarella (the eprfect melting mozzarella for baked pasta dishes). Fortunately, both are available, although the Polly-O only at Walmart of all places. Some weeks, I hit 4 grocery stores to get everything I need.

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i have been eating soft foods this week because of dental stuff. Twice i have made bucatini....i beat an egg yolk with olive oil, garlic, fresh lemon juice and zest, and lots of fresh grated parm. I dump the hot bucatini in which cooks the egg. I then add spoonfuls of the cooking water to make it a sauce. When not going strictly soft, i sometimes throw a handful of arugula in too to up the nutrition.
i almost never eat bucatini in public despite it being my very favorite ....there is no graceful way to eat it....it has a mind of it's own.

I haven't tried the pasta sauce, but recently discovered Rao pizza sauce when the store was out of my favorite locally made sauce. I still prefer my usual, but Rao makes a very good pizza sauce. Nearly all the other substitutes I've tried have been too sweet and just not good.

Agree on the Bolognese. I've never been a fan of the Italian-American spaghetti and meatballs. I believe a truer Italian version would be spaghetti, with one large meatball on the side? I'm sure, in our typical American way, we took a big juicy meatball and decided to turn it into 10 small ones so they'd cook faster and we could sell more. :)

lol...thought it was just me. It's something about the extra thickness that makes it go every which way. But that doesn't stop me from eating it in public!

Maybe I am too concerned about my dignity. :D There is absolutely no way to eat it without it coming alive and flapping all over the place and splashing sauce on my face or clothes. I have even broken it in half before putting in the boiling water thinking smaller pieces would be more manageable but that didn't help. And it for sure won't twirl on a fork....or at least it will pretend to and the minute you pick up the fork it all flies off. I find that bringing my mouth about 3" from the bowl and working very fast gets some in my gullet before it can escape but I am not going to do that in a restaurant. It is still my favorite pasta. And my favorite is carbonara with bucatini which I had in Rome a year ago tomorrow for my birthday lunch. And for dinner I had cacio de pepe. My mouth is watering just thinking about it.

Indeed. The reason I like Rao's is because it is not at all sweet. I don't like sweet sauce.

Rao’s sauce is owned by a food company that also has Stonyfeld yogurt and other brands.

i only noticed Rao’s a year or two ago.

it costs more and is worth it. Once I sigh-bought the other brand at Costco when they were out of Rao’s marinara and I was utterly disappointed. I complained about it on the Costco thread.

i’ve seen Polly-O at Restaurant Depot in sf. I’ve definitely searched many a shop to get the brands we love.

i love bolognese but now love the convenience of Rao’s. I get their pizza sauce at Safeway and theoretically the marinara at Costco despite having avoided Costco since 3/16.

agreed. Swoon. I love Rao’s.

Dinner tonight will be grilled pineapple and strip steaks, with stir fried vegetables and coconut rice.

Buffalo chicken wraps and a green salad. Last dinner before we head to the lake house, so didn't want leftovers!

Cheeseburgers on roll-ppang
Oven fries
Caesar salad (new best recipe)

Haagen daaz chocolate & Robbins rocky road in bowl
Robbins rocky road & Robbins Icing on the (Susie)cake in bowl with waffle cone
robbins icing on the (Susie)cake & Haagen daaz fresh mango on waffle cone


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