I like basil as much as the next guy, and some is essential in almost any tomato-based dish, but I like oregano a lot more than the next guy. I definitely plan to add too much oregano.
And yeah, I could start with fresh tomatoes… but that would mean not just eating the fresh tomatoes. Plus I’d have to wait the better part of a year before I could start.
Another bonus to not using prefab jar sauce: yours won’t be so godawful sweet (unless you like that and choose to add sugar). I’m increasingly unhappy with commercial foods involving tomatoes because so much sugar gets dumped into it.
Ah, that’s more for a “Sunday sauce” type of deal it sounds like. Most of my pasta sauces take no more than 20 minutes to cook up for a “fresh” taste as opposed to a “long-simmered” concentrated taste. I love both, but, you know, I don’t always have the luxury of time.
Forget the tomatoes: everything pre-cooked has sugar, fructose, fructose syrup, saccharose syrup… I had a ham recently: fructose syrup. Why? It was ham, not jam! I had a rye bread: same shit. What for? The list could go on and on. The more I read the ingredients, the more I cook myself starting from scratch.
And that’s used to disguise how acid/unripe the tomatoes are. I never add sugar to my spaghetti sauce. I do add fresh oregano and sometimes fresh basil too. But that depends on the state of my homegrown herbs.
Yeah, my Cento All-in-One brand has half the sodium of Ragu Traditional Spaghetti sauce, for example. And that’s not any “low sodium” version. However, their regular All-Purpose Crushed Tomatoes do not have any added salt, at least according to the label, and have less than 10% of the sodium of Ragu.
Red Gold is another domestic brand worth checking out. They have very good tomatoes, grown in Indiana, I believe.
It’s good to have so little sodium. I still remember the brouhaha about how much salt companies were adding to canned food (and frozen) back in the late 70s and early 80s. I think Consumer Reports was involved, along with much of the medical community. That’s when low sodium products started to appear.
That’s probably one of the reasons I dislike the vast majority of commercial pasta sauces. But as I said, I’ve found a few that I like (three, to be specific). I currently have two of those brands, and just checked the labels. None of them have sugar.
However, @Chronos is right about the salt, if one is concerned about such things. Both of them are made with sea salt, and if one looks at the percent daily value of sodium, one is 17% and the other is 20% per half cup! That may be OK if one is eating in an authentic Italian style, mixing a small amount of sauce with the pasta and having a small amount of pasta because it’s just one small course in a larger meal. But if spaghetti is the whole meal, and you like pouring a whole lot of sauce over the spaghetti like I do, then you’re probably overdosing on salt. My solution is to not think about it.
Incidentally, as also a lover of Chinese foods, I’ve noted that the amount of sodium in soy sauce is positively fearsome!
The superb Italian restaurant I worked for (the owner was Calabrian) made their basic marinara sauce with a giant can of crushed tomatoes and a lot of sauteed garlic, and crushed red peppers to taste, cooked together for a little while - 15, 20 minutes (as per pulykamell). You want to use excellent quality crushed tomatoes.
Afterwards they always added a LOT of chopped fresh parsley to serve.
Another option is to use 1/2 spaghetti sauce and 1/2 crushed tomatoes.
Personally, I find the easiest option is to put your tomatoes (in my case garden during late summer from my MiL, but otherwise chopped, ‘no salt added’ storebought work fine) in a slow cooker overnight / up to 24 hours. It cooks out a lot of the excess moisture, condenses flavor, and adds a no-sugar added sweetness. For flavor, we add roasted garlic and onion, basil, a touch of rosemary, cider vinegar and salt to taste. After the 18-24 hours, hit it with the stick blender, portion and freeze.
As an aside, I’ve noticed that some (not all) of the better pasta sauces contain carrots. That may seem like an odd ingredient, but apparently the function of the carrots is to cut the acidity of the tomatoes and produce a mellower sauce. It may also have some function in reproducing the flavour of soffritto, a traditional Italian sauteed mix of carrots, celery, and onion.
The quality that I find in the best pasta sauces and lacking in all the lesser ones, even if homemade, is the quality of mellowness combined with rich flavour. This is not an easy thing to achieve without a great recipe, great ingredients, and a lot of experience.
Marinara is practically the easiest thing to make. You can find many recipes on line like this classic sauce but the base should be whole peeled “Italian-style” (Roma) tomatoes (not watery diced tomatoes with the skin still on which will make a thin, flavorless sauce), garlic, olive oil, then salt and pepper to taste plus oregano, basil, rosemary, thyme, or whatever pleases your palate. Some people insist on sweet onion and others consider it an abomination but whatever works for you; without the onion it will take only about 20 minutes to cook; with onion you need to cook until it breaks down which will take an additional 20–30 minutes. Be warned; once you have freshly made marinara all jarred sauces just taste flat, stale, and frankly terrible.
Do you really eat half a jar of sauce at a sitting? Setting aside the salt content, most jarred sauces also add a lot of sugar to try to enhance the flavor that tomatoes will lose after being cooked and canned. I’d actually be as concerned about the excess simple carbs as the salt. The pasta really doesn’t need to be swimming in sauce, especially if you are using fresh pasta; a layer will stick to the pasta and flavor it. Again, the freshly made marinara will have much more distinct flavor that doesn’t require as much sauce per serving.
My favorite casual Italian cookbook:
Stranger
As usual, we think a lot alike. A long simmer will cure a lot of ills for tomatoes, and the process can be hurried up a bit by the addition of a spoonful of tomato paste. Tomatoes may turn a bit bitter after a long simmer, so a small amount of sugar takes care of that. If a pasta sauce has more than five ingredients, it’s often not worth making. Simpler is better, such as in aglio e olio (garlic & oil) or carbonara.
“All”? I would have expected better of you than such unqualified absolutism. As I already said several times upthread, most – in fact, the vast majority – of commercial pasta sauces are terrible. But several – most of them in limited local production – are extremely good. The fact that they come in a jar is rather irrelevant.
Again, you’re talking about the majority of the mass-market sauces. But there are others.
I’m not trying to endorse any commercial sauces (which is one reason that I never specifically named any) but a very few of them are indeed very good. One of the three I like is solely the product of a family-owned upscale Italian grocery, so in no sense even mass-market at all. But it does come in glass Mason jars.
Totally agree, in terms of the major ingredients.
Reading the label of my current favourite marinara pasta sauce: tomatoes, olive oil, garlic, onions, sea salt, herbs.
Thanks for bringing that up. I do sometimes add tomato paste to a shorter simmer sauce if I want some of that long-cooked concentrated tomato flavor in it.
And, yes, “simpler is better” is a rule I learned a long time ago after struggling so much with making tomato sauces at home. The first problem was I was using supermarket tomatoes instead of good canned tomatoes. The second was that when the result wasn’t flavorful enough, I just started adding more and more stuff into it, which just made it worse. Once I learned simple three- or four-ingredient sauces with good ingredients, it all made sense to me. My bolognese (a bit more involved of a sauce) has nothing more than salt and pepper in the spicing department. (Sometimes I’ll put a hint of nutmeg.)
I was surprised back then (20 years ago) when my girlfriend at the time brought me back a cookbook from Florence and all the sauce recipes were dead simple (and is where I first observed that no sauce had both garlic and onion in it.) Here’s the ingredients for Tomato Sauce I: tomatoes, olive oil, onion, salt, basil. Tomato Sauce II: tomato, olive oil, garlic, basil, salt, chili pepper. Just start with good tomatoes. That’s it.
It would work, but it isn’t hard to make it much better. Heat up some olive oil in a pot. Add a diced onion. If you have a piece of celery and carrot, chop these up and add them too. Add a little bit of ham (or sausage or any pork product) and some ground beef. Once the meat is brown, add a can of tomatoes or two. Season with a little salt, pepper and whatever Italian seasoning. Let it simmer for twenty minutes. If feeling fancy add a bit of milk or cream or butter before serving. Quick, easy, delicious, healthy. Keeps for a week or two.
Don’t bother with fresh tomato. Quality canned tomatoes are much better. Look for peeled ones, preferably from San Marzano - Costco sells six packs at reasonable prices. Passata (liquid puréed tomatoes) is as good as canned.
When I make my own marinara, I usually start with a can of whole tomatoes (preferably Cento brand San Marzanos if they’re available). I start by grating some onion and sauteeing that in butter with some salt and pepper and minced garlic and red chili flakes until the onion starts to brown, then in go the tomatoes andI hit them with a potato masher. Get everything mixed together and let it simmer for 20-30 minutes without stirring, then finish with some olive oil and fresh basil.
Agreed; occasionally I’ll use fresh Romas if they are really ripe and juicy for a lighter sauce but the canned tomatoes are far more consistent and frankly have a richer flavor.
Actually, if you just simmer the tomatoes they’ll break down pretty well on their own (or with just a little help from the potato masher or wooden spatula), and the you can run the resulting sauce through a food mill with a medium or coarse plate to get rid of seeds and skin to get a homogenous product with less mess and effort.
Stranger
I’ve never bothered filtering my sauce, but when I make marinara it’s usually for homemade deep dish pizza so I like for it to be not entirely smooth.