How to sauce
I don’t even think we’ve talked about this, and I just made sauce three times in a week, so.
You should never buy pasta sauce from a jar, you respect yourself
The fundamental thing is this:
- A halved, peeled white onion. Ideally you want to trim the bottom stem such that most of the firm bit is still intact, because you’ll be removing the onion afterward.
- Two pounds of roma or san marzano tomatoes. Canned works shockingly well, better than you think, but obviously nothing beats fresh.
- A half stick of butter. No, you can’t sub olive oil.
Throw it all together, heat at medium-high for 30 minutes, mash the tomatoes up with a potato masher or the side of a wooden spoon, add some salt & pepper. After 30 minutes, take off heat, remove as much of the onion as you can with a pair of tongs – it’s done its job – and immersion blend the rest after it’s stopped bubbling.
That’s it. That’s the whole recipe.
You can stop reading now, but you won’t
What separates you from your Italian grandmother is the fact that you can add pretty much anything to this, within reason, at any time. Obviously a lot more can go into pasta sauce. Does it need to? No, this three-ingredient thing can sustain you into perpetuity with the right technique & good tomato sourcing. But you like having fun, and there are obviously a lot more things than tomatoes around. There are herbs, peppers, mushrooms, garlic, parm rinds. (You do freeze your spare parm rinds for moments like these, right?) Garlic really comes around shortly before tomatoes peak, tomatoes are symbiotic with basil in a garden, and tomatoes & peppers are part of the same genus, so they tend to peak at the same time.
I like playing off the acidic brightness of tomatoes to make something fresher. I also like a lightly spicy sauce. This is untraditional, but I have the heat tolerance of a kiln. At base, a dash of aleppo flakes brings a nice brightness to the affair. Habañero goes well, too – especially one fresh pepper, de-seeded & carefully de-ribbed. Same with bird’s eye. But you really don’t want to overdo it, or you risk steamrolling the tomatoes and making a hot sauce by mistake.
If you’re hard up for time or you’re using fancy heirloom tomatoes (whomst amongst us), add a carrot, which will naturally thicken the sauce when you immersion blend.
Due to respecting myself, I always add a lot of garlic, usually two heads, right at the beginning. I also add a lot of fresh basil at the end, right before blending, as well as a dash of powdered rosemary once it gets to temp. (A little goes a long way when it comes to rosemary.) Depending on what’s in my fridge, I may butter-fry cremini or bake some lion’s mane on the side, then throw in after blending.
A note on dried pasta
The rule is this: if there’s powder in the bag, it’s good pasta. That means the pasta was probably made reasonably traditionally, with good flour, and whomever bagged it didn’t care ruthlessly about the presentation.
Afeltra, Rusticella d’Abruzzo, and Martelli all clear this bar, but there are others. Martelli is my favorite dried pasta on earth. You can buy it here.