Hunt's Fire Roasted Tomatoes Review

I like a good char on my food as well as anyone. As Gordon Ramsay says, "Color is flavor" when it come to cooking. But Hunt's Fire Roasted Tomatoes goes too far beyond the char.

I bought several cans of the fire roasted and diced tomatoes to use in my southwest style chili and rustic pasta sauce. The picture on the label looked appealing - chunks of tomatoes with blackened grill marks striping the the surface. What was in the can, however, was surprising. The chunks of tomatoes were there, alright, but so were bits of black skin floating on the top and distributed throughout the contents. And I'm not talking about a couple of small flecks here and there, I'm talking confetti sized pieces of of burnt to black skin as large as a quarter inch square!

I don't know about you, but I take pains not to burn my food. Caramelization is one thing, charcoal is another. I made the mistake of adding it to my pasta sauce and immediately regretted it. On simmer, many of the black bits floated to the top and made it look like I burned the food at the bottom of my pot. (Yeh, yeh, like you haven't done that before.) Worse, the black bits tasted burnt. I tried to skim the bits off to save the sauce, but it didn't help as the skin that was still attached to the tomato chunks also tasted bitter.

I guess I don't get it. Why would anyone want to prepare food that tastes like this?

Please, Hunt's, peel the burnt skin off of those fire roasted tomatoes!

And in case anyone wants to know, I like a good roasted pepper that has been charred to black and then allowed to sweat in a paper bag. Slide off the skin and the emerald interior is heavenly - sweet, smoky and spicy. But I don't eat the blackened skin. Do you?