I’m zeroing in on a basic recipe for tomato pasta sauce, and I’d like some input: opinions, suggestions, preferences, etc.
Plenty for two people:
Medium can (400g) of crushed tomatoes
3 tablespoons tomato concentrate
1 tablespoon sugar
1 medium onion
1 medium Cubanelle (Italian frying) pepper
half red bell pepper
1 stalk of celery
1 clove garlic
1 frozen hamburger patty (75% beef 25% pork, not too thick)
Fresh basil, dried oregano, salt, olive oil
Chop all vegetables and sauté in olive oil, starting with onion and garlic with a little salt. Add crushed tomatoes and enough water to fill half the can, sugar, concentrate, spices and frozen patty. Cover and stir occasionally (break up patty) for two or three hours until good and thick.
There’s little or no browning happening. Would that be an improvement? The frozen patty is just for my convenience. Would it make much difference to brown it fresh from the butcher’s?
Other recipes call for wine, black pepper, carrot, Worcestershire sauce, clove, chili flakes, bay leaves, parsley…
Ditch the celery, add wine. Also, use both tomato paste and tomato sauce in addition to diced tomatoes. I would use fresh ground pork and brown it in olive oil. The frozen patty may be okay, but definitely break it up and brown it. Take it out and saute the veg in the fat (add a bit more, if necessary). Then add the tomato paste and cook until the oil is absorbed and the paste has turned a darker red. Then add the meat back in and the other tomato products. If you’re using fresh herbs, add them at the end. Otherwise, add dry herbs at the same time you add the tomato paste. Simmer all of it for about an hour. Garnish with fresh cut basil. For dried herbs, use oregano, thyme, rosemary and parsley.
For simplicity and deliciousness, very little beats Marcella Hazan’s three ingredient sauce. 2 cups tomatoes (about a 28-ounce can, 800 g), 5 tablespoons butter, half an onion (literally, just cut in half, no further dicing). Cook for 45 minutes occasoinally while smashing down tomatoes as they break down. Remove onion, taste for salt (add as much as necessary), serve over pasta.
So you definitely want to start with good quality tomatoes. Most of my basic Italian tomato sauces are no more than about four ingredients or so. Another standard one for me is tomatoes, olive oil, garlic, dash of dried oregano.
Now, if I’m doing a meat sauce, then, yeah, I’ll add a batutto of onions, carrots, celery and often parsley and layer flavors from there (wine, milk if I’m doing a bolognese, possibly chicken livers, pancetta, etc). But for a simple tomato sauce, I just want the focus on tomatoes, with one herb as an accent, and either onions or garlic (not both when I’m keeping it simple) and serve with pasta with generous grating of your preferred salty cheese (like percorino romano, grana padano, parmigianno-reggiano, etc.)
Well, it depends on what you’re going for. In a classic bolognese, you generally don’t want browning. You want the meat to cook gently and have it remain soft and tender. Typically, you cook the raw red out of the meat and then once it’s changed color, you add milk, cook it down, then add wine, cook it down, and then continue with the rest of the recipe.
Now, that’s not the only way to do it. Many cooks do brown their meat for a bolognese. The browning will add a roasted flavor to the sauce, and the texture of the meat will have a “tighter” texture than that of a non-browned bolognese. (But I may be digressing here, as bolognese really isn’t a tomato sauce so much as a meat sauce that happens to have tomato in it.)
What makes for a good basic sauce is such an individual matter that opinions really become meaningless. Experiment, do what works for you, * mangia!*. I really only offer one bit of advice and only because it works well for me. If it’s not for you, tell me to eat another cannoli and stop talking.
There really is no substitute for good tomatoes and long cooking times. Everything else is negotiable. When I want pasta and red sauce, I don’t want to wait 2+ hours for a properly made from scratch sauce. As a result, I tend to make huge batches (10 quarts or more) so that I can portion and freeze most of it. I make 3-4 batches a year, 4-6 hours invested per batch and put out a plate of pasta anytime I want in about 15 minutes.
If you have the freezer space, you might want to give this a shot. For ME, the convenience and quick meal prep make the freezer space a worthy investment.
I would agree with #1. That’s the most important thing. Unless your tomatoes are in season and you know you can source good quality fresh tomatoes, use a good brand of canned tomato. San Marzano is the gold standard, but there is so much “San Marzano style” out there you have to know what you’re buying. You might have to look out for DOP certification on your can. I actually likely some American brands of tomatoes and go for them. (6-in-1/Escalon brand ground tomatoes are my favorite for sauces. 7/11 Ground tomatoes are also very good.)
For #2, well, it depends what you’re going for. I personally like a lot of fresh tomato sauces that are only cooked for maybe 20 minutes at most. Arrabiata, for instance, if I’m using ground tomatoes or a passata, I just cook it long enough for it to be cooked through and very slightly thickened. Maybe 10 minutes. These have a very different flavor than long-cooked sauces. They’re fruitier and “livelier” to me than long cooked sauces, which have a more mellow, but perhaps deeper(?) flavor.
And that’s a fair point pulykamell. As always, the perfect way to cook anything is the way in which the cook and his/her loved ones enjoy it. I like my sauce cooked for quite long time so the flavors mellow but I do end up losing that bright tomato freshness. My sauce is very rich, usually meatless, chunky and with a lots of different vegetables to enhance the texture and appearance.
Truthfully, when I have really good, fresh tomatoes, the idea of using them in a cooked red sauce just seems wrong for me. When I want to bring out and exploit that flavor, I would sooner make a nice caprese salad or bruschetta. That’s just me and if I’m wrong, so be it.
I have used honest and for true San Marzano tomatoes and yes they are better. But, for my money, they are not sufficiently superior to justify their increased cost. That’s assuming I can even find them in my rural location.
2-3 pounds tomatoes, chopped
7 oz. pancetta or bacon, sliced in 1/4" julienne strips
1 onion, sliced thin
1/4 cup olive oil
salt
1/4 cup fresh basil
grated pecorino
pepper
Heat the oil and cook the onion and bacon for about 10 minutes, stirring occasionally. Add the tomatoes and a bit of salt, cover and simmer for about an hour. At the end of cooking, add a good pinch of ground pepper and the basil leaves. Serve over pasta and top with peccorino.
Pretty much this. I use fire-roasted crushed tomatoes, usually, and will switch between oregano, basil and sage depending on season, what I am going to pair it with, etc.
Lots of great advice and ideas. You guys have kicked up my game by a gear if not a whole level! Molto generoso, grazie.
Chefguy: I thought celery was used a lot in Italian cooking? This is about the only time I use it, and I do so only because I thought it was customary in Italian cooking. Thanks for that recipe; I’ll be making it that way next time.
Pulykamell: The butter sounds intriguing, as does the milk for bolgnese. I had no idea and will be looking into that. What about processing the vegetables with a blender or food mill? It that something anyone does when preparing these sauces?
Alpha Twit: Fennel sounds like a very good idea for a vegetable-based sauce. I like fennel a lot (not sure why, either; it just agrees with me), although I only use it in stewed white beans at present.
I’d fry the onion pepper and celery first at a moderate heat to get a bit of decent caramelisation.
I’d set that aside and then brown the meat in batches at a high heat and set that aside.
Veggies back in (don’t clean the pan first) and add the garlic and any dry herbs. Personally I’d add a pinch of dried chilli and a little nutmeg at this point too. Give that a few minutes on a low heat and then add some balsamic and stir round to deglaze. Only then add the tomatoes and sugar. I’d also add a little milk for simmering liquid and then set on a low heat for perhaps an hour.
Then season and add fresh herbs 5 minutes before the end.
Milk is standard in bolognese. This is the recipe I use for bolognese, from the Simili sisters of Bologna. You could also look at Marcella Hazan’s recipe, which is similar. (Marcella Hazan is to Italian cooking in the US what Julia Child was to French. Her cookbook “Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking” is required for anyone interested in Italian cuisine.)
I have seen some recipes that call for processesing the vegetables for a bolognese in a food processor first, like this Bon Appetit recipe.
Do note that as I said above, a bolognese is not a tomato meat sauce so much as meat cooked down with tomatoes. The final product is like a thick sloppy joe in consistency, not like a jar of Ragu or Prego in consistency (these are all American references, but I believe the OP is familiar with them.)
And, yes, celery is used commonly in Italian cooking–it forms part of a vegetable base called either battuto or soffritto that is used much like mirepoix in French cooking or “the holy trinity” in Creole cooking. I typically use it for meat sauces, but it can be used on its own in a tomato sauce, too. (Marcella Hazan has a recipe for a simple tomato sauce which starts with tomatoes and then the finely diced celery, onions, and carrots are cooked crudo in the sauce, that is, they are thrown in raw and not fried or softened first.)
ETA: Looking at Hazan’s “Essentials of Classit Italian Cooking,” the very first chapter called “Fundamentals: Where Flavor Starts” begins with a section on battuto, sofrtito, and insaporie.
It does state that at one time the standard ingredients were lard, parsley, and onion, but now often include garlic, celery, or carrot, depending on the dish, and with olive oil substituted often these days for the lard.
So whether your battuto contains celery will be a manner of local or family tradition and/or personal taste. Pretty much all the current online sources I can find do at least celery, carrot, and onion in their battuto, with some also calling for garlic, leeks, and/or parsley.