Have you ever found yourself at the grocery store staring at the brands on the store shelves and wondering “which one should I pick”? Price is one way to choose of course, but wouldn’t you like to know which tastes best? I’d love to taste test every brand if I could. Each time I take a brand off the shelf I wonder, is this the right one for my recipe or for my family’s tastes? Should I buy the local brand? Is the Italian import of tomato sauce or the salsa from Mexico inherently better, or do my American suburban taste buds prefer what I grew up on? So many choices and so little time to explore them all.
So what’s a cook to do? Have a party of course and invite guests to vote on their favorites!
In this “Taste Testing” section of the website, we’re posting the results of our taste testing to remind our friends and family which ones they preferred, and to remind us too. I’ll be happy if these results are helpful to you too, but remember, taste is subjective, so consider the results of our tests a starting point, and have fun discovering your own favorites.
If you’d like to repeat our tests, here’s what we did:
- Each brand was served in bite-size pieces on a plain white plate, with no label or any other indication as to its brand name.
- Each taster was asked to sample all the available brands and select their favorites.
- If only 2 or 3 brands were in the test, guests were asked to vote on all of them, placing them in first, second, and third place.
- If four or more brands were in the test, guests were asked to vote only for their top two favorites.
- Note that people preferred to choose from about three options. More than that and they commented that it was difficult to remember.
- Each taster wrote their votes on a 3″x5″ card and turned it upside down on the pile of other votes. Tasters were asked not to share their voting results until all the votes were tallied.
- The winning brand was then used in a recipe for that day’s party.
Try this at home or at the office. You could be amazed at the fun and conversation a little competitive taste-testing stimulates. And please share your results in the comment fields below, we’d love to hear them. Maybe we’ll post them.
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