I find generally cans of spaghetti sauce to be far too sweet, low in vegetables and fiber, and far less tasty than making homemade, which is easy. Rao’s is okay, but things from their cookbooks are far better.
I heat up olive oil and butter, add a cup or so each of diced onion, carrot and celery. Add meat and brown it - ground beef is good, as is ham or prosciutto, and bacon or pancetta or sausage. Combinations can are better. Consider deglazing pan with cheap wine. Add a large can of quality crushed tomatoes and/or passata (liquid tomatoes) and simmer for at least 20 minutes up to hours. Add celery salt, lots of garlic and black pepper, and spices you like.
I add several specialty ingredients. But they are personal secrets of enormous value. They depend on what sauce I am making - the Italians have several dozen.
Bingo, and I agree about the marinara variety. Rated best in any taste test you can find. I suggest adding a glug of red wine to pasta sauce and perhaps a tablespoon of tomato paste and let it simmer on low for a good while. I like Italian sausage in my pasta sauce, but it’s not required. At the end of the simmer, add a tablespoon of butter and stir until melted and the sauce is silky.
The basis for my tomato sauce is canned crushed and diced tomatoes, with tomato paste and maybe a small can or two of cheap canned tomato sauce for proper thickness and texture.
Then I add salt and pepper, lots of minced garlic, basil, oregano and whatever other spice seems appropriate at the moment, along with plenty of browned hamburger meat, sauteed onions and chunks of eggplant.
The sauce I prepared on Friday was a bit different than usual because I added a goodly amount of red pepper flakes. The result was just the right amount of heat.
Occasionally, if too lazy to defrost a container of my own sauce or in a rush, I’ll use a jarred pasta sauce, like one of the Kroger Private Selection ones which are pretty good. But I don’t bother adding extra ingredients to them.
We semi-regularly doctor up jarred or canned spaghetti sauce. Usually that consists of finely chopping some onion and garlic and sauteeing them, then putting the sauce in. Then there’s usually some additional herbs- almost always basil, and often a bit of oregano too.
From there, it’s about balancing the sweetness and acidity with sugar and vinegar. Commercial sauces very rarely require any sugar though, they’re almost always pretty sweet. Often a bit of acidity helps though, and wine vinegar in small (1/4 tsp) amounts to taste can help.
Once that’s done, we simmer it for a while, and when we think it’s done and just before serving, we adjust the salt, if necessary. Again, the commercial stuff is usually pretty salty, so if it needs adjustment, it doesn’t require much.
If you want to add meats like Italian sausage or ground beef, they should be cooked separately and put in after the onions and garlic are sauteed.
I’ve had plenty of scratch-made pasta sauce made from fresh (homegrown or store) or canned tomatoes, and none have been as sweet as commercial spaghetti sauce is. That’s a deliberate stylistic choice on the part of the manufacturers, and IMO, it’s because they’ve found that they can’t go wrong when their savory foods are on the edge of being sweet. In other words, the people buying the sauce like it that way.
Yeah, around here Rao’s Marinara is about four times the price of “ordinary” sauces like Prego or Ragu, which is really a ripoff. You’d think you were getting the Pasta Sauce of the Gods, but it’s really just a fairly decent pasta sauce. Both of the locally made deli sauces I mentioned are much cheaper, and better. The best of the whole lot is Pusateri’s Semplice, available to anyone living in north Toronto, which I currently am not. Despite being an upscale boutique grocery with high prices, their heavenly Semplice is still cheaper than Rao’s.
I’ve also tried “Truff” brand marinara, a supposedly really upscale pasta sauce with truffle. Meh! I’d rather have almost any of the others mentioned here.
I add a dash, and I do mean a dash, of balsamic vinegar to lots of things. It’s a little bit of umami and a little bit of sour and a little bit of sweetness that lurks underneath everything else and seems to enhance the taste of many dishes in an unexpected way.
Getting off the topic of pasta sauce for a moment, yes, I agree. I always keep a bottle of 4-leaf rated sweet balsamic around. If that makes me sound like a high-class canine chef, no! When I’m feeling really lazy or just out of other things, and I’m reduced to putting a tray of Swanson’s TV dinner in the oven, here’s what I do with the brownie that always comes with it. I pry it out, put it in a shallow bowl, add a couple of scoops of Haagen-Dazs vanilla ice cream, and then drizzle with the sweet balsamic. It turns a mundane dinner into at least a classy dessert!
If I’m making a savory dish and keep thinking “something’s missing,” I have stand-bys where a tiny amount might click everything into place. Sometimes all it takes is just a teaspoon or so of anchovy paste or Marmite or Worchester or vinegar. For spaghetti sauce I’d go with anchovy paste.
lagniappe: My Texas granny taught me to put a dash of cocoa powder in chili. It’s a surprising improvement.
Italian sausage instead of hamburger. Cooked and drained hamburger is just tastless filler, you might as well use sawdust.
Red sauces give me heartburn, adding sugar, just a tablespoon solves that issue.
Rather than prepared sauce from a jar I use Roma Tomatos. They have more tomato flesh and less juice than most others. They will fall apart and make a good sauce on their own. You may want to pull some of the tomato skins out but I usually dont.
Real, fresh mushrooms, fresh garlic if I have the time but usually a spoonful of diced garlic from a jar. I like to put canned olives in too.
Parmesian cheese. Shreaded or powdered, doesn’t matter. That is about it.
Never would have thought of balsamic vinegar or Worchester. Thanks for all the suggestions, as well as any future suggestions. I will definetly try a lot of them.
I will also try the other Rao’s sauces. My local Safeway has something called “Yo Mama’s” spaghetti sauce; that could be good.
I do not know how to saute onions and garlic but I can learn!
I think eating Spaghettios and Chef Boyardee as a 70’s kid may have ruined me as far as appropriate levels of sweetness. Mmmm HFCS! =p
Sweet, salty, tangy, umami, spicy… I kind of want it to hit everything at once, which may not be possible.
Cowboy Cooking on YouTube suggests adding a packet of brown gravy! Haven’t tried that yet.
Pasta is practically the only thing I “cook”. I use store-bought pasta sauce, and, being one who likes my food spicy, I add some Frank’s Hot Sauce when I place the pasta sauce on the pasta.
Very easy, though I don’t normally add onions to pasta sauce. But when I do want to add onions to something – it’s most frequently beans – I sautee the onions in the same saucepan that I’m going to add the beans to. A regular heavy saucepan, not a non-stick.
You just chop up about half or a bit less of a peeled white onion (I always use white by force of habit) with a good sharp chef’s knife, then pour a couple of tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil into the saucepan. When the oil seems hot and is flowing readily, throw in a small piece of onion. If it sizzles, it’s ready to throw in the rest. Stir with a large spoon or spatula like in the picture below. (I normally just use a large spoon myself.) If you’re not sure when the onion is done, it’s definitely done at the first sign of starting to turn golden. Hint: white onion contains a lot of moisture, so use more than you think you’ll need – you’d be surprised at how much the volume reduces! And when I say “half”, I’m referring to a white onion, which are generally much bigger than yellow ones.
Garlic is much the same but it’s a pain to peel the cloves so minced garlic in a jar is often the better approach.
Makes sense; cocoa and coffee have undergone the same Maillard reactions that browned meat has, so by adding a bit of either to something like chili, you’re amplifying those flavors. Coffee in steak rubs works surprisingly well also, for the same reasons.
I’ll have to try that. I add instant coffee to increase the “dark” of dark chocolate desserts like mousse or fudge, but hadn’t thought to add it to a savory dish.
I used to make a multi-bean stew with ground beef many, many years ago (as in ‘decades’). That bit of instant coffee always had people asking what that flavor was.
