What to put in it?
I have never made it from scratch before.
Please give me your best spaghetti sauce recipe, okay?
I put in garlic, oregano, and basil. I don’t have any set amount, I just do it till it tastes right to me. I put in more basil than anything else and more oregano than garlic. Toward the end of the cooking I then add parmesan cheese and occasionaly pepperoni if I have it around.
I think this is probably spicier than most people like, I have to make a seperate sauce for my SO consisting of just tomato sauce and mushrooms with just the parmesan cheese added.
I used to make my own sauce. My current recipe is:
Pick up the jar of Sockaroony. Open jar, empty into pan. Serve with pasta.
Um, I remember it needs garlic, onions, peppers, basil, oregano, black pepper. And I LOVE mushrooms. That’s all I can think of.
Take a couple of 28oz cans of whole, peeled Roma tomatoes. Drain 'em, and seed 'em, but save the liquid (toss the seeds).
Chop up at least 1 yellow onion (more is fine) and 2-3 cloves of garlic (more is fine…are you sensing a trend?;)).
Pour some olive oil in a pan. Sweat the onions (sweat=like saute, only the temp’s lower) until translucent. Toss in the garlic and don’t let it burn!!! or even get brown.
Toss in the tomatoes and let simmer for 45 minutes or so. The tomatoes should sort of…melt.
Moosh the tomatoes up with a potato masher or a hand blender. I like my sauce kinda chunky, but smooth is fine.
Take the leftover tomato-liquid, put it in another pot. Toss in 1/2 tsp oregano, 1/2 tsp salt, 1/2 tsp pepper and at least several tablespoons of fresh chopped basil (the dried stuff doesn’t taste right, but if you have to use it, put about a tablespoon in), 4 tablespoons of sugar, and about 1/4 cup of white wine. Boil this until it reduces by about 1/2 and is kind of syrupy. Pour it into the other tomato mixture, stir and adjust spices to taste. Cook for another 20 minutes or so. If you’re going to add (cooked) meatballs or sausage, add it now.
A weird, but effective addition is to take a couple of tablespoons of the pasta-water and mix it into the sauce just before serving. The starch in the pasta water makes the sauce stick to the pasta better. Strange, but true!
Fenris
I’ve made many different kinds of sauce many different ways over the years, but recently I’ve been doing an adaptation of the canned-tomato one from THE GREENS COOKBOOK (that fency-schmency vegetarian restaurant in Frisco).
Heat a tablespoon or two of good (extra-virgin) olive oil in a saucepan. Finely chop a medium yellow onion. Add to the pan with about a half-teaspoon of salt, a few good grindings of fresh black pepper, and a teaspoon of dried basil. Saute over medium heat for about eight minutes. Add three or four minced cloves of garlic and a bay leaf. Saute for 1-2 minutes. Pour in a half-cup of red wine and deglaze the pan. Add a 28-ounce can of tomatoes, gooshing them through your fingers (alternatively, just use crushed tomatoes). Simmer over low heat for about 30 minutes. Taste for S&P before you serve.
Sometimes I add some dried oregano and/or crushed red pepper at the onion stage. Sometimes I add meatballs and let them simmer in the sauce for an hour or two.
Get a bottle of Celentano. It’s better than anything you can make.
Banana oil.
Any homemade sauce is better than any commercially-prepared bottled sauce. Because it’s been made with LOVE
(pause for gagging)
Trust me. Spaghetti sauce is really, really hard to fuck up. Just look at the times and quantities in Fenris’s recipe. It ain’t souffle-making.
Sung to the tune of Joan Crawford’s “No Wire Hangars”:
No Oregano! (whap whap whap)
No Oregano!! (whap whap whap)
NO OREGANO (whap whap whap)
Repeat chorus.
= = = = =
I never add oregano, although I may sprinkle some on the garlic bread. IMHO it makes any wonderful sauce you can make taste like store-bought. I use extra ripe fresh or canned tomatoes (if fresh, dice & cook them down for an hour or so, if canned, just dice & heat up before adding other ingredients). In a cast iron skillet, brown some minced garlic & shallots in olive oil & add to the tomatoes (including the oil). If you want meat in your sauce, don’t use ground beast- use sausage. Break up a tube of breakfast sausage in the skillet & brown it in the manner of ground beef. Sausage will not break up as finely as ground beef so you’ll have chunkier sauce (a plus, IMHO). You can affect the final flavor of the sauce by selecting various brands of sausages like sage, spicy, sweet, etc.
Once the sauce is hot, I add finely grated romano- not parmesan. In my opinion, that more than anything gives the sauce its characteristic flavor & rich whole-house-penetrating aroma. Let the cheese sit on the surface of the sauce as it melts into the mixture by itself. Do not add grated cheeses unless the sauce is hot, otherwise the cheese will settle to the bottom & stick to the hot metal of the pot.
I can’t give exact measures, because I usually make a huge pot of sauce. Finally, I add a little salt (1 tsp) & sugar (1 tbsp) for a richer flavor. I let my sauce cool down for a few hours at room temperature, and then place in the fridge over night. The flavor will have intensified by the next day.
I cook garlic bread face-down on a cast iron griddle using a bacon press to keep the bread firmly in contact with the griddle surface.
Fenris’s recipe is good. I don’t do the step where you cook the tomatos until they melt, I just use cans of tomato puree, or puree 'em myself. If you have a hand blender thingy, you can use diced tomatos and use the hand blender to blend to the desired consistency.
Also, try throwing in a couple of anchovies with the onions & garlic. Trust me - they disappear, no fishy taste or anything. But they do add a depth to the sauce that’s hard to get otherwise.
I use red wine, not white. Never tried white in a tomato sauce. Hmmm… will have to do that. I also usually use dried herbs, unless it’s summer and I have fresh.
On a side note, this brings to mind the end of August this year, when I was faced with many, many tomatos from the garden that were about to rot. I had been making tomato sauce and freezing it, which is a labor of love. All the tomatos have to be peeled & seeded before making sauce, and that takes time.
Come the first week of September, all we have left are cherry tomatos. 7 pounds of cherry tomatos, to be exact. You ever peel and seed 7 pounds of cherry tomatos? Damn right I did. Took me something like 3 hours. And you know what? The sauce ended up tasting just like normal tomato sauce.
There will be no more cherry tomatos in the garden next year.
All I can say is to try the recipes posted by Fenris and Ike. They are good starting points. Athena did mention one good addition, and that is the anchovies. This is the secret to authentic Marinara sauce. The word Marinara is not a reference to marination but instead derives from Marine as in the sea. The anchovies were probably a way of getting some salt into the recipe.
One important caveat however. When using anchovies, please be sure to rinse the oil off. It has a very strong fishy flavor and can take over the pot in a hurry. Someone else also pointed out that you should add some sugar. I find this to be an excellent way to round out the flavor.
Finally, I do not think I’ve seen anyone mention my own secret ingredient yet. I always add a tablespoon or two of some good red wine vinegar to my sauce. It gives a nice sharp note to the flavor set.
A few more pointers (some already mentioned);
[li]Never allow the sauce to boil.[/li]
[li]Never allow the onions or garlic to brown.[/li]
[li]Always sweat your onions and garlic before adding.[/li]
[li]Try adding some chopped celery leaves from the heart of a bunch of celery.[/li]
[li]Sautee your mushrooms in a little oil and butter before adding to the sauce.[/li]
[li]Always reduce wine by half its volume before adding.[/li]
[li]Add spices during the last half hour of cooking time. Prolonged cooking merely volatilizes the herbal oils and flattens the sauce.[/li]
[li]Many sauces benefit from being allowed to cool and being reheated. This allows the sauce to “marry up”.[/li]
[li]I personally avoid adding any cheese to the sauce, I feel that it alters the flavor too much.[/li]
[li]Try sprinkling the cheese on your pasta before you pour on the sauce. It allows the pasta and cheese to work together instead of having a heap of cheese that slides off of the sauce.[/li]
PS: Fenris and the rest of you. Feel free to cross post your recipes over to my recipe thread.
Hey, I noticed this in Attrayant’s post, and then again from Zenster…
What’s the point of sauteeing your onions, garlic, or whatever in a SEPARATE SKILLET, and then adding them to the pot of sauce?
One of the charms of a pasta dinner is that you can make everything (except the actual pasta) in the same pot.
And from the flavor side, you get more oomph from your oil and onions when you add the liquids to the sauteeing pot, and scrape up any of the stuff that got stuck to the bottom.
Okay, if I’m doing meatballs (the kids are on a meatball kick lately) I may brown them in a separate skillet (although I’m more likely to pour off accumulated grease and start the sauce in the meatball pan, returning the meatballs to it once the sauce has simmered for a bit). But if I do a Bolognese sauce, or just crumble some Italian saussage into the sauce, I brown the meat right along with the onion and garlic.
Gee, I dunno. I do it that way because I always have. I also like using my cast iron skillet, and enjoy the aroma of sautéing garlic. I’m also part of the “mix groups of ingredients and then mix the results” school. Not saying it wouldn’t work any other way, that’s just the way I’ve always done it.
Now that I think about it, maybe the flavor of the garlic, et. al. is helped to migrate into the sautéing oil, the better to blend with the sauce. This is just a theory of mind & I have no case studies or scientific proof to back it up.
Also, if using onions instead of shallots, I find that sautéing them takes a little of the bite out. I don’t like biting into a piece of onion & tasting nothing but onion. IMHO, the onion, garlic, et. al. is there to flavor the sauce, not to be objects of flavor themselves.
You miss my point. I agree that the onions and garlic must be sauteed, I was asking why you don’t saute them in the same pot you make your sauce in.
In other words, cook the onions, add and cook the garlic, add the tomatoes.
I did them in a separate pan once, when I was living off-campus during my undergraduate days. One of my roomies was Italian-American (she was from Texas, but still), and I can still remember the look of consternation on her face…
No problem Ike, do 'em right in the pot if you want. Other people like to fry off the meat and then add the onions and garlic with it as well. In that case you need to drain the meat and onion mix before adding. It all depends on the style of sauce you’re making.
When you have assembled the fabulous recipes above (and invited me for some, of course) -
add a pinch of sugar, a pinch of salt, and a dash of worchestire sauce.
I know, it sounds wierd…but if you want that true ‘italian’ taste, try this. It sets off the tomatoe paste, and ads just the right touch to the sauce. True story.
Aggggggggh! You two are working TOGETHER, aren’t you? To drive me mad?
WHY.
WOULD.
YOU.
USE.
A.
SEPARATE.
PAN.
FORSAUTEEINGTHEONIONS???
(psssst! aenea! Worcestershire includes anchovies, which is probably what’s giving it that Italian flavor. It also includes onion, garlic, vinegar (wine), molasses (sugar) and other things you’re probably also putting in the sauce.)
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Ukulele Ike *
**
Aggggggggh! You two are working TOGETHER, aren’t you? To drive me mad?
WHY.
WOULD.
YOU.
USE.
A.
SEPARATE.
PAN.
FORSAUTEEINGTHEONIONS???
<smugly>
I suggested using the same pot as the tomatoes
</smugly>
grinning, ducking and running!
Actually, it’s because saucepans tend to have less surface area than skillets or frying pans and you can sweat more stuff faster in a frying pan. But frying pans are the pits for sauce and adding tomatoes to a reactive pan like a cast-iron skillet is a bad idea.
That said, I’m lazy enough that I’m willing to take the extra time to sweat the onions in the saucepan rather than having to wash another pot.
Fenris
Fenris
Aaaah… I get it. See, Uke?!? The real reason they use two different pans is that they have inferior cookware!
glances fondly at her All-Clads, which are more than ample in surface area and quality to both saute onions and simmer a sauce
Nice variation to the above is a Sicilan version, learned from a friend (uh, who’s Sicilian, actually):
- by all means dissolve the anchovy in the base sauce
- hold back on the basil, oregano, but g’head w/ the bay
toward the end of the simmering time: - add chopped black olives (pit them first, of course)
- add chopped green olives (yes, pitted)
just before serving: - swirl in a generous dollop of pesto
Comments: the late addition of the pesto keeps the basil fresh-tasting; must confess I prefer to down the amount of green olive–though I love 'em–and bobbit in some drained and rinsed capers. I also add just a titch of crushed red pepper at the very end of the saute stage, but that’s surely optional.
It’s a really robust, satisfying meal–and it can be made completely vegan by eliminating the anchovy, and substituting for the small amount of cheese in the pesto.
Veb
Great stuff so far guys. Fenris, I’ll be over tomorrow night. Don’t worry, I’ll bring the vino.
Here’s an sorta-sauce that’s quick and spicy.
Shiva’s Puttanesca for 2
One 14 1/2 can chopped tomatoes, drained.
10 or 12 black olives, pitted.
10 or 12 green olives, pitted.
1 Tbsp. capers.
2 cloves garlic, smashed (not chopped).
1/2 onion or 1 shallot, chopped fine.
Basil, parsley, marjoram, salt and pepper to taste.
Sautee the onion until it just browns around the edges. Add the garlic and immediately add the olives and capers. Sautee for a few minutes then add the drained tomatoes. Season and serve. If it’s too thick you can add some of the juice from the canned tomatoes (you didn’t dump it did you?). Only use fresh tomatoes if they are truly ripe and fresh.
10 Bonus Points if you know where the name Puttanesca comes from. 