Yes, exactly. Make that a few times and then come back to this thread and decide where you want to start zhuzhing it up.
My recommended order of operations for upping my “dead easiest” outline while still keeping to a very basic red sauce, descending from most important:
Jarred garlic → fresh garlic
No onion → yes onion
tomato sauce → crushed tomatoes → whole san marzano tomatoes
20 minutes simmer → 30-45 minutes+
dried herbs → bundle of fresh herbs (you take the bundle out when the sauce is done)
Do bear in mind what was mentioned upthread about sweetness: expect that your sauce will be much less sweet than the jarred stuff, but that’s a good thing.
This thread is full of great advice because tomato sauce is one of those beautiful dishes that can be done a million tasty ways while still being its quintessential self. Commit to growing comfortable with the most basic version of it and then figure out your own personal million and oneth.
I can get those at my local supermarket and yeah, they’re amazingly convenient.
You may have heard about the old Italian ladies who cook their sauce all day on Sunday. You can throw in all of the things people have mentioned in this thread but if you don’t let it simmer long enough you won’t have a good sauce - you’ll just have flavored tomatoes. I liken it to The Calvin and Hobbes strip where Calvin puts bread in the toaster, toast pops up, and Hobbes wonders where the bread went. Something magic happens when you simmer tomatoes for a long time. There’s no shortcut. It takes a few hours minimum.
I freeze leftover tomato paste in tablespoon amounts on a parchment sheet, then store them in the freezer in a plastic bag. The only problem is, I forget it’s in there.
No it doesn’t. Yes, if you’re doing a Sunday sauce, you want hours. You have all sorts of meats in there you need to cook and to flavor your tomato sauce. Your basic tomato sauce is just simmered for 20 minutes, give or take ten. It all depends what you’re going for, of course. Much of the time you want that fresh, tomato flavor. I have all sorts of Italian cookbooks here, and the basic tomato sauces are only simmered for that long. Like here’s one from Culinaria Italia: Tomatoes, olive oil, sage, balsamic vinegar, salt. Simmer for 10-15 minutes according to the instructions. Marcella Hazan’s English-language bible on Italian cooking, Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking says: “pasta sauces may cook slowly or rapidly, they may take 4 minutes or 4 hours …” Her recipe for basic garlic and basil tomato sauce cooks for 20-25 minutes. Same with her amatriciana (pancetta & chile pepper). When I’m at my friend from Naples’s house for lunch, he whips up a tomato sauce for the pasta in the time that I’m there bullshitting with him, and it’s fucking awesome every time. Basic tomato sauce from San Marzanos + good pasta + real parmigiano reggiano or pecorino romano is a delicious lesson in simplicity. And I cannot stress, also, how much that good cheese adds in terms of salt + umami. Finished usually with torn basil leaves.
If you have meats in the sauce, sure, you need more time. For basic meatless tomato sauces? A half hour is more than enough.
A freezer problem I encounter much. Yesterday I was cleaning out the chest freezer, as I was portioning and storing some 99c/lb ground beef I found at the local packing house, only to find a turkey leg marked 11/23. I thought, “wait, I didn’t do turkey this year.” And I don’t think I did it the year before, either. Oops. I have to set a day a week I go through, defrost, and cook the stuff that’s in there.
I know this may be pedantic and probably wrong since I don’t have an Italian grandmother but I learned that tomato sauces are
Pomodoro: Tomatoes, garlic, olive oil (the mother sauce)
Marinara: Pomodoro + fresh basil added at the end
Pizza: Marinara + dried oregano. But then again isn’t “real” NY pizza sauce just tomatoes?
As for canned tomatoes, after watching Ethan Chlebowski’s video on the issue I specifically look for tomatoes without calcium chloride. The difference is night and day and I now refuse to go back to tomatoes with CaCl2.
A chef friend of mine knows I like pizza with red sauce and tomatoes as a topping. He once made me a red sauce pizza topped with fresh tomatoes, lightly pickled tomatoes, and dehydrated tomatoes. It was delicious
There are lots of pasta sauces. “Spaghetti sauce” is one of them and I don’t think most people expect it to have “that fresh, tomato flavor.” They expect it to taste like what Grandma called “gravy” or “zugu”. You can put anything you want on pasta but if you want what people call “spaghetti sauce” it has to simmer a long time. If there was a shortcut I’m sure the Grandmas would have figured it out because having that giant pot taking up half the stove all day got in the way of cooking everything else.
There’s not a woman over 5 feet tall in my family, we call pasta “basta” and proscuitto “brazhoot”, and the life stories of all of my aunts and uncles include either “is a priest/nun” or “was training to be a priest/nun but …”, so you can trust me on these matters.
OK – you do have a point there. For what most people at least in the US think of as “spaghetti sauce” you’ll want something long simmered, and probably also good with a bit of tomato paste to emphasize that long-cooked flavor. That is also part of the reason I hate most jarred spaghetti sauces. First, it’s the sugar, second I prefer fresher tomato flavor in my sauces for spaghetti. I call the fresh stuff “spaghetti sauce” as well, but perhaps just “tomato sauce” would be less confusing. But even if I’m doing a classic marinara, it’s 45 min - 1 hr, which is how I learned from my Neapolitan immigrant friend and his mom. I see people doing it everywhere from 30 minutes to 6 hours, which is not unexpected given how family recipes vary wildly.
100% agree on jarred sauces. Sugar doesn’t belong in there at all and I’ve never had one with any depth of flavor. I’m convinced that some are just batches of ketchup which didn’t come out right so they label it spaghetti sauce.
According to Kroger, their canned diced tomatoes yield about 8% of recommended sodium intake for a half-cup, and around 5% of recommended sugar intake. The figures are similar for their canned crushed tomatoes. So if you pile on a lot of sauce onto your pasta, the salt and sugar could add up.
This could be avoided by using only fresh tomatoes, using a longer cooking time and making a big batch to freeze for later use.
I think Rao’s does a reasonable job, but it’s bloody expensive. Amazon has it for around $8 a jar, but it’s a buck or two more at my local grocery. It’s crazy when I could just make it myself easily enough with little effort and be able to control it exactly to my tastes. I get the convenience factor, but in terms of my schedule and lifestyle, it’s not an inconvenience for me to cook either a slow or long-simmered sauce, and with the latter, I even get the bonus of getting that lovely home-cooked smell through the house. (Plus they don’t make my favorite tomato-based sauce – puttanesca – anyway. This is the second time I mentioned it in this thread and, you know what, I think that’s what has to be for dinner tonight, or at least one of the dishes as I doubt my kids will eat it.)
That’s interesting, because that’s such a staple of Italian-American families around here (Chicago), NY, wherever. An entire meal goes into that pot! Pork neck bones, sausages, bracciole, meatballs, etc. Whatever combination you’d like, though the pork neck bones are or at least were quite popular around here (they’re getting harder to find, so I suspect ribs may be substituted).
Turned out I had all the ingredients for puttanesca in my fridge and cupboard, so we made a lunch for two with my wife! Bliss.
Who are these people? The Italian side of my family was all about the slow cooked sauce with various meats, meatballs, sausage for sure, or pig’s knuckles for my grandma back when you could get pig’s knuckles at the A&P. Meat is not even the slightest bit unusual.
Are you adding turkey legs or corned beef or something?
Yes and no. You can make a delicious sauce in under 45 minutes of cooking and extra cooking does not help it much. Traditional recipes (see Sunday Gravy by Bourdain) often use a lot of cheaper cuts of meat^, or have similarities with making a roast, which are rendered much more delicious with long cooking times. To say these are always needed is wrong and depends on specifics.
^ Though cheap is not always still the case. Oxtail, like lobster, was once cheap. Neck bones still are.
