User "euxleon" on Reddit: I spent 8 months testing every brand of canned tomato with a controlled pasta sauce recipe. Full rankings inside:

Early 2025 (around NYE), I got into an argument with my brother-in-law about whether San Marzano tomatoes are worth it and I said "I'll prove it" and then I became a person who owns a refractometer.

Here, I tested 24 brands of canned whole peeled tomatoes, around 3 cans of each brand (to account for batch variation). One sauce recipe held constant and a blind taste panel of my wife and two friends who now regret knowing me.

I’m happy to see that one of my favs, Bianco DiNapoli, is on top. My usual (whole and crushed Cento) tomatoes make a decent ranking as well.

To me, it doesn’t matter if they are San Marzano or not. All I care about is flavor.

Also speaking of San Marzano, Gastropod’s latest episode (Canned Tomatoes and the Myth of the San Marzano) has some great lines:

In the 1990s, the slow food movement (it was founded in Italy just a few years before) they wanted to bring the original San Marzanos back. But when they went looking for San Marzanos being grown near Naples, they found 20 different kinds of tomatoes all being called San Marzano. What had happened […] is that Italian tomato growers had let their tomato plants have lots of indiscriminate sex.

So they just chose two out of those and said "These are the official San Marzanos".

Gastropod also points out that even if you buy a can of San Marzano in the US with the DOP label on it, it‘s not actually fraud if they aren’t San Marzano from the magic region in Italy. The US doesn’t honor European DOP regulations. There aren’t enough DOP San Marzano tomatoes grown, and they sure aren’t sending them to the US.