In a pinch, when I’ve wanted to make sauce but only had cans of diced tomatoes on hand, I’ve run them through a blender, which works OK if you have to resort to this.
I’ve made sauce from fresh when I grew my own Roma tomatoes. A lot of work, but very very worth it. Fresh sauce made from ripe garden tomatoes is one of the most sublime things in existence.
What I do:
Plunge tomatoes in boiling water for just a minute to make their skins easy to remove.
Cut tomatoes in quarters and remove "jelly’, keeping only the ‘meat’ (use jelly in soup or something if you want to).
dice tomatoes in 1/2-1/4" chunks.
Wrap in cheescloth, tie around a wooden spoon or something and twist spoon to squeeze all excess water out of tomatoes (again, save tomato water for something else if you wish).
Run about 2/3 of tomatoes through a blender or food processor. Save 1/3 for chunkiness (adjust to your sauce chunkiness preference).
Saute minced garlic in olive oil. Add tomatoes. Add salt to taste. DO NOT COOK FOR LONG- you want the fresh tomato taste to stand out. Add shredded fresh basil toward the end of cooking.
Serve on good pasta with a little fresh grated Parmesan.
Oh yeah, I almost always give a basic tomato sauce a whir with the ol’ immersion blender, but for years I’ve wrinkled my nose at diced tomatoes because I have a vague understanding that they don’t work quite right. I’ve just never really known precisely why.
I really miss not having my own canned tomatoes in the pantry. We always bought and canned 40 pounds of over-ripes every year, which is what commercial canned tomato companies use. They’re cheaper and very flavorful. People don’t usually buy them because they’ve gone mushy.
I just checked my subscription details: I pay 8 Euro every four weeks just for the news, digital edition. They offer “News, plus Games, Cooking, Wirecutter and The Athletic” for only 12 Euro every four weeks (which is less than a month, I believe). I feel milked.
Citric acid is another thing I prefer not to see in my canned tomatoes. I have stomach issues and tomatoes by themselves are acidic enough. I know it acts as a preservative, but I try to avoid it when I can.
This always adds some fresh flavor to jarred sauce. If I find I am running out of spaghetti sauce, I’ll run out and by two jars of Muir Glen brand and split my remaining sauce between them so I can survive until fresh tomatoes show up at the farm market.
1: If possible, start by browning some alliums, preferably in olive oil.
2: Then, add some sort of canned tomato product, but best one without calcium chloride, and keep an eye on the salt content of that, too.
3: Add a few herbs to taste.
4: Simmer for about 20 minutes.
Passata from De Cecco is probably the best. I guess it is available in the USA too.
Add some more. And salt to taste.
Longer is better, but if you are very hungry, it will do. My suggestion: Make double the amount. Eat one half after 20 minutes if you must, leave the rest simmering. When you finish eating, just taste the rest and compare. Next time I bet you’ll simmer longer. I guess saying that it is a fight between Lucullus and Chronos could be confusing considering your nick? But that is what it boils down (ha!) to.
The passata, mentioned several times upthread, is often (always?) bottled in glass. I can frequently find it on sale on an aisle endcap at one of the more ‘international’ groceries I shop in.
I also recommend adding some fine chopped flat parsley just before serving. It really punches above its weight and lasts quite a while for a fresh herb.
20 minutes is enough for a simple sauce, that isn’t loaded with a ton of flavors that you want to bring out. My sauce has no recipe and is based on something I saw on PBS back in the 90s. I named it the all-fresh ingredient spaghetti.
The trick on this one was that after 10 minutes of cooking, the chef drained off the excess liquid into another pot and worked on reducing that for 10 more minutes and then added it back to the mix of tomato, onion, oregano, and garlic while still cooking that mix in the big pot. I did find it to still be a bit watery so I started toying with it. Mine now has mushrooms and sausage in it, and sometimes basil. I’m not above adding a small tin of paste (for thickening) or bottle of passata to make it go further if I find I didn’t purchase enough tomatoes. Add some fresh cracked black pepper and good parmesan before serving. It’s fabulous.
I disagree a bit, but it depends what you’re going for. No on the browning – just translucent, so we agree. But I disagree on necessarily adding more herbs. You don’t need a lot. Or at least I don’t. I very rarely add much in the way of herbs other than finishing with basil (or parsley) at the end. And longer is not necessarily better. Once again, depends on what you’re going for. I prefer most sauces lightly cooked so they retain their fruity flavor and don’t develop the caramlized flavors of long cooking. For a bolognese, sure. That I cook like 2 hours or more on the stove. For a simple tomato sauce? I like it tasting “fresh.” It’s not a matter of being in a hurry usually. The tomato sauces I mentioned in my Florentine cookbook cook for 15 minutes only. That Marcella Hazan sauce with onion, though, is an hour. Look at this recipe, for instance:
Ten minutes once the tomatoes go in.
But there’s no one right way to cook. I like fresh fruity tastes – you may like more mellowed, deep tastes. I only like one herb or possibly two to accent the tomatoes. Marcella’s butter & onion recipe has a total of zero herbs in the cooking.
No problem: we agree on variety. I have developed a way of cooking that is sometimes more like confit. I like it, but I know that shearing heat has its pleasures too.
I will say, if I had to pick one tomato sauce that packs a serious flavor punch, that’s pasta puttanesca. Very easy to make, but you have to like olives, capers, and anchovies. That’s one that can be whipped up in 20 minutes. Makes me quiver at the knees just thinking about it. It’s been too long since I’ve made it.
Anchovies are one of the very few foods that I dislike (along with asparagus, eggplant, strong mushrooms, coffee, and… I can’t really think of any others), so I’ll give that one a pass.
This is what I used to do as a bachelor, not browning the onions, but cooking them until they’re soft. It worked a treat because the time to make the sauce wasn’t too much longer than the time needed to boil a pot of water and cook the pasta. It takes less than 10 minutes to fry up some onion and add canned tomatoes, then the 20 minutes to simmer is boiling water and cooking pasta time.
Our neighbor grows a ton of tomatoes (they are farmers). Every year she cans quart jars filled with diced tomatoes, onions, a bit of green pepper. She gives us a case every year and I’d be lost/sad without it.
Anyone else use the extra potent tomato paste in a toothpaste tube. Sometimes just a bit of it makes the sauce.
When I lived in Hungary in the turn of the century, I loved it when late August/September rolled around, and perfectly ripe tomatoes flooded the market at insanely cheap prices. (I don’t recall the exact prices, but it was something like 20 cents a pound back then.) I’d load up on those, Hungarian wax peppers [sweet and hot, also dirt cheap], and onions and spend a day cooking up lecsó/letcho/lecho and canning it for the winter. That stuff was delicious just fried up with some eggs, or served with pasta, or as a base for goulash/pörkölt. I miss those flavorful, fruity, economical tomatoes. I’ve made lecsó many times here in the US, but it’s never tasted as good as that.
ETA: And that tomato paste in a toothpaste tube was all over Hungary. You could also find red pepper paste that way, as well as flavored paste for cooking stews like goulash. (I think there was also a garlic and/or onion one.) I wish those toothpaste tube tomato pastes were more common in the US. They’re findable, but not ubiquitous. They beat the hell out of the tinned ones in terms of convenience. Even with the smallest cans, I only end up using half at a time usually, and it’s annoying to store an open can in the fridge, and by the time I need to use it again, it’s usually dried out and sometimes getting moldy. I buy jars of it with lids now at the Eastern European grocery, but would prefer the tubes.