Supplier story
The quest to create the perfect pastas and sauces for the new ready meal range took the Sainsbury’s team all the way to Italy.
Fresh sheets of smooth egg pasta, lashings of pure Italian extra-virgin olive oil and a flavoursome ragu sauce, borne from a week of passionate cooking and tasting in a small cottage on a remote Italian mountainside… Not a coveted family recipe or the makings of a speciality dish at a popular Italian restaurant, as you might expect, but one of the surprising revamped ready meals in the new Italian range appearing soon at Sainsbury’s.
A huge amount of effort has gone into the relaunch of our popular Italian ready meal range. To ensure the new recipes are as authentic as possible, the Sainsbury’s team, led by product developer and former chef Hamish Christall, even journeyed all the way to Turin, Italy.
With the help of top Italian chef, Ugo Massaglia, Hamish and the team spent two weeks experimenting with different ingredients in a cottage in Ugo’s village hometown of Rocca Canavese, an hour outside Turin.
'Italian cooking is more of a lifestyle than a habit,' says Hamish. 'Every morning we would go down to the local market to sample the freshest ingredients and enjoy the buzz of the Italian way of life. All the Italian grandmothers would be up early drinking their cappuccinos while we picked the best artichokes, mushrooms and fresh produce for our recipe testing.'
After a rigorous testing and tasting process, the team devised the three foundations of the new range: a rich ragu, a vibrant tomato sauce and a brilliant creamy béchamel sauce. These three stalwarts of Italian cooking laid the foundation for a range that favours quality classic pastas, bakes, risottos, lasagnes and cannelloni.
'We wanted to get back to the fundamentals of Italian cooking and start afresh,’ says Hamish. ‘If you can’t get the basics right then everything else will go catastrophically wrong!'
For those looking for some healthier meal options, there are also six ‘heat & stir’ meals with lighter summery flavours that take their inspiration from different regions of Italy. And with some delicious choices in the range, there’s no compromise on taste. These ‘heat & stir’ meals include a Sicilian-inspired tender Tuna spaghetti with chilli oil, olives and roasted red peppers, and a tempting Chicken & basil pasta, a classic dish with its origins in the regions of Piedmont and Liguria.
Other good news is the inclusion of top-quality Italian extra-virgin olive oil in all the ready meals, plus the freshest egg pasta and only British meat. There are also family-sized portions if you have more than one mouth to feed.
'We really made an effort to include the best ingredients,’ says Hamish. ‘We’re using a great-quality, high-protein egg pasta and a better grade of leaner meat. Supporting British farmers is also really important to us.'
Even top chefs admit it’s OK to cheat a little in the kitchen sometimes, and the new Italian range means you can get a great-tasting, top-quality meal in minutes. We’ve done all the hard work for you so all you have to do is tear open the packaging, pop the meal in the microwave or oven and pour yourself a relaxing glass of red.
