Pasta Sauce from Scratch

Sorry, make that “Why is salt so ubiquitous?”

Mmmm. Saucy sauce.

And as for the freezing part, you should be able to freeze any cooked tomato sauce and have it be OK for quite a while. Just make sure you put it in well-sealed container. You might want to experiment with a small batch just to make sure you’re happy with the results. I generally freeze one-serving portions so that all I have to do is cook the pasta and zap the sauce. It’s about a million times better than a commercial sauce, IMHO.

GT

You should be able to freeze the sauce, yes. But can you reheat it without overcooking it? That’s where the problem can lie.

Salt is a necessity in cooking. It has a way of melding together flavors that nothing else does. You don’t necessarily need a lot of it. Just a little bit. Also, in tomato sauces a little bit of sugar is a normal addition if the tomatoes are a bit on the tart side. Personally, I don’t use it, but some people swear by a pinch or two of sugar.

When I make sauce, I usually make big batches of sauce. The amount of time used spending peeling the tomatoes is fairly trivial once you get the water boiling. Once you take the tomatoes out of the water, it should take you no more than 2 seconds per tomato to peel.

Anyhow, the more important point, in my opinion, is to deseed the tomatoes. My sauces showed a dramatic improvement in taste and consistency when I started doing this. I thought it was a waste of tomato, at first, but my taste buds convinced me otherwise.

Fresh tomato sauce is so simple, there’s really no reason to make a huge batch and freeze. I used to love this recipe:

1 can (14oz) peeled chopped tomatoes
1 clove garlic chopped and fried in olive oil (don’t burn it!)
salt
pepper
sugar (a small pinch)
herbs like basil oregano (fresh is better, dried will work fine)
hot pepper flakes

These are all things you can have in your pantry all the time, for sauce making on a moments notice. It doesn’t take appreciably more time to cook up fresh sauce like this than it takes to defrost and heat frozen sauce. Hell, you can put it together in the time it takes to boil up a pot of water.

Sometimes there’s no choice. Come and visit my garden and you’ll see what I mean. I picked about 60 tomatoes last week. And they just keep on coming.

Nitpick: Actually, the best fresh tomato, like a huge, juicy beefsteak, makes a lousy sauce. Better to use a plum tomato, which is not nearly as good fresh.

I have an undeveloped theory that 4-chambered tomatos are better fresh, and 3-chambered tomatos are better cooked. Further research is required.

On freezing sauce: I do this all the time with leftover spaghetti sauce. I just put it in a ziplock bag, remove as much air as possible and seal. To defrost, you can put it in a bowl and microwave it until it’s “melted,” then heat over very low heat.

The neat thing is, if what you’ve saved is not enough for the next meal, you can keep adding leftover bits to the already frozen stuff.

Now, another question: I have tried numerous times to make pasta sauce and it always turns out different and it is awful. Most of the recipes in this thread suggest adding various herbs, but you’re not telling me how much! I need specifics! Confession: I have been using sauce from a jar for about 40 years. The Ragu “Rich and Meaty” style is my current favorite.

Generally, Romas (aka plum tomatoes) are better saucing tomatoes because of their ample flesh. I’ve used Big Boys and even Beefsteaks quite successfully. Like I said, just make sure to scoop out the seeds. But the plums are the classic saucers.

Alton Brown on making a versatile, pantry-friendly tomato sauce: recipes here; transcript here, in which Mr. Brown explains that unless you have good access to locally-grown gems, you are better off with canned tomatos.

His advice is absolutely correct. Supermarket tomatoes suck ass 99.9% of the time. Occasionally, you can find some good vine-ripened tomatoes, but this is one place where the canned product often beats the “fresh” produce in your average supermarket. Anyone who has ever tasted a garden tomato knows the difference. If you never have, then I pity you, for you don’t know what a tomato should taste like.

I do have access to local tomatoes, and they all look beautiful. That was part of this thread. I’ll make sauce from canned tomatoes eventually, I’m sure. But the truth is that the produce I’ve been getting at this farmers’ market has been so much better than what I get at any grocery store, and I’d like to take as much advantage of that as I can. I just ate the best pear I’ve ever had last night.

Freezing has the added benefit of being great for a busy grad student, but this is about taking advantage of the yummy I have access to until about October.

Some tips: Go to your local farmers market and ask for seconds, especially later in the season. These are slightly bruised or slightly deformed or slightly overripe tomatos which farmers can’t even give away because we’ve become so picky about our food looking good. However, when they get pureed into a sauce, they actually turn out better than the picture perfect ones because they’re riper.

Second of all, make lots. Tomato quality and price varies quite considerably over the year and it’s best to make an entire years worth in one day and then freeze it than live with mediocre or canned tomatos. If you have good enough pots, you can overreduce your sauce until it’s almost like tomato paste and then reconstitute it when serving. This actually leads to better flavour because the sugars in the tomato caramelise but you have to be careful not to let it burn.

Third, buy a food mill. A food mill purees without cutting so it can trap all your tomato skins and seeds but let the flesh through. It turns sauce making from tedious to absurdly simple.

Fourth, get good ingredients. Theres really no point in skimping on quality when theres so few ingredients. Onions, garlic, salt, pepper, tomatos.

Saute the onions, then saute the garlic. Add the tomatos roughly chopped and then cook for 30 minutes until the flesh is soft. Put it all through a food mill and then return it back to the pot and let it cook for another 2 - 3 hours. Split into individual servings and freeze. You can then doctor the sauce with almost anything to make a wide variety of different pasta sauces.

A note on reheating the sauce without burning/overcooking it.

If the sauce has been properly cooked before it was frozen you don’t actually need to reheat it.
Defrost it by leaving it on the side during the day (or hide it in the oven if you have pets…)
Cook your pasta, drain it, turn off the heat under the pan, throw the sauce into the pan and put the pasta back in as well.
By the time you have stirred it together, the sauce will be warm enough from the pan and pasta.

If you want to serve it in a fancy bowl, drain the pasta over the bowl. The water will warm it through.

How do you overcook pasta sauce? A traditional italian slow cooked sauce requires at least 8 hours of gentle simmering. The longer the sauce is cooked for, the better it becomes.

I find that 3 hours is a good compromise because plain pasta sauce gets rather boring so I always use that as a base and cook it for a further hour or two with other ingredients to let flavours meld. Plus, the time in the fridge and freezer also seem to advance the breakdown of certain chemicals which leads to further flavour. You could, of course leave it to cook for 8 hours but pasta sauce is not like stock where you can leave it unattended. You essentially have to stir at least every 10 minutes once you’ve cooked it down which means it’s incredibly labour intensive after 3 hours.

First of all, Cecil on salt. The gist of it is that it makes you more receptive to flavors.

Long & short of it is this: pasta sauce is not the best use for big fresh tomatoes.

The best thing you could do is something like this: make pasta with garlic, butter & oil and eat tomato slices on the side with mozzarella cheese, fresh basil, S&P, a little oil, maybe a little balsamic. Just eat 'em with a knife and fork.

You might also make risotto and put fresh tomatoes on top. But, I wouldn’t know (and don’t want to find out) how risotto tastes with vegetable stock.

To really make a nice sauce, you’ll want to “food mill” those 'matoes and add a lot of salt. There’s a LOT of salt in canned tomatoes.

There are sauces where I’ve used fresh tomatoes. I’m not going to tell you about them though because I don’t want them to wind up on spinach leaves. They also use a lot of meat and wine and meat stock and it doesn’t sound like you want to go through all of that. And, the meat is essential to the flavor. I’m not going to be responsible for a shitty sauce because someone thought they could take meat out of it.

It may not be the best use, but it is a spectacular use. We make a lot of pasta sauce from our garden every year, of various varieties; and we don’t use meat in it; and it comes out beautifully. I think the roasted-tomato sauce was my favorite from this year, although I’m also partial to the fresh, barely-cooked sauce:

You take your tomatoes & seed & chop them (don’t peel them).
You fry up about a half-onion until it’s translucent.
-You throw in salt and pepper and a few cloves of garlic.
-You throw in your chopped tomatoes and a handful of chopped basil.
-You cook it just until the tomatoes start to lose their integrity.

It’s quick and easy and very delicious.

Daniel

Of course not. All the finest chefs use Campell’s condensed tomato soup.