tomato sauce is sort of a bit of a hard sell. you can go to a bit of trouble to make your own, and it'll be fine--better than jarred sauce--but it won't make the dish; it will not wow your intrepid diners. it hardly seems worth it: after all, why bother when there are enough gussied up varieties available on any supermarket shelf to make your head spin?
actually, if we're being honest, i tend to think of jarred tomato sauce as prime midnight snack material. is this totally gross? far too often when i wake up hungry in the middle of the night i have an uncontrollable urge to spoon an entire jar of the stuff down my throat. it's usually on muggy summer nights that i'll catch myself slurping sauce in a dark kitchen, illuminated only by the humming refrigerator light, exposing me in all my snacking freakishness. something about that cold hit of acidity, slightly chunky but still slippery enough to inhale at an ungodly rate, really beckons to me when making a peanut butter and jelly seems to be asking an awful lot.
on pasta i can take it or leave it. but pizza--that's when i really notice it. on good pizza, jarred tomato sauce is a bull in a china shop. it's heavy on the tongue, saccharine, over-spiced, puddled with oil, and miles away from anything tomato. for most of my cooking years, when called upon to make tomato sauce i would usually start with fresh tomatoes in an effort to exhume the sauce from its preservativey grave--but it never wowed me. always too garlicky, too oily, too fusty with dried herbs. turns out i was over-complicating things. friends, there is an alternative.
enter marcella hazan's three-ingredient tomato sauce, which i'm embarrassed that i haven't shared with you sooner. of course she, the creator of my favorite smothered cabbage soup, would simplify an italian cornerstone with such elegance. here's what you do: you take a big ole can of whole peeled tomatoes, dump them in a pot with a knob of butter and a halved onion, and you cook the whole mess real slow for 45 minutes. next you take the onion out, devour it with pepper and flaky salt, and completely forget about your sauce. then you'll remember it and feel sort of guilty, and you'll carefully salt your sauce and then quietly spoon it over any surface that will hold still long enough for you to baptize it in tomato glory.
that's it. no garlic at all. not even olive oil. if, right about now, you're piping up with a "but olive oil has heart healthy unsaturated fats and a classic mediterranean flavor blah blah blah," that's your business. but just know that marcella makes no mistakes. this sauce tastes vibrantly clean, rich with butter but not slick or oily. the onion infusion is genius: you get a haunting allium backdrop without the textural interruption of chopped onion. what you really get is pure, gutsy, humming tomato taste like nothing from a can.
you can use it to elevate a lowly bag of dried pasta. if you're trying to impress your friends/family/crush/scary dinner guests, pool it over fresh, homemade pasta, no grated parmesan required. its higher calling, though, is pizza. while a lot of unreliable internet sources will tell you that pizza sauce is by definition more heavily spiced than pasta sauce, i'm a subscriber to just the opposite camp. traditional napoletana pizza, as i understand it, is sauced with straight up crushed san marzano tomatoes. marcella's deviates ever so slightly, but the theory remains the same: other flavors belong in toppings, not in sauce. so: if you want basil, dot your finished pizza with whole basil leaves. if you want garlic, throw on a few roasted cloves of garlic. if you want anchovies, tear up a few and sprinkle them on top of your pizza before sliding it in the oven.
then again, you could skip the pizza altogether and just squirrel away a double batch of sauce, because you never know when you'll need a midnight snack.
tomato sauce with butter and onion
adapted from marcella hazan's the essentials of classic italian cooking
makes enough sauce to lightly coat about a pound of spaghetti, or three smallish pizzas
remove pot from heat, discard the onion (hint: eat it), gently salt sauce to taste (you might find that your tomatoes came salted and that you don't need to add more) and keep warm while you prepare your pasta. serve with spaghetti, with or without grated parmesan cheese to pass.
actually, if we're being honest, i tend to think of jarred tomato sauce as prime midnight snack material. is this totally gross? far too often when i wake up hungry in the middle of the night i have an uncontrollable urge to spoon an entire jar of the stuff down my throat. it's usually on muggy summer nights that i'll catch myself slurping sauce in a dark kitchen, illuminated only by the humming refrigerator light, exposing me in all my snacking freakishness. something about that cold hit of acidity, slightly chunky but still slippery enough to inhale at an ungodly rate, really beckons to me when making a peanut butter and jelly seems to be asking an awful lot.
on pasta i can take it or leave it. but pizza--that's when i really notice it. on good pizza, jarred tomato sauce is a bull in a china shop. it's heavy on the tongue, saccharine, over-spiced, puddled with oil, and miles away from anything tomato. for most of my cooking years, when called upon to make tomato sauce i would usually start with fresh tomatoes in an effort to exhume the sauce from its preservativey grave--but it never wowed me. always too garlicky, too oily, too fusty with dried herbs. turns out i was over-complicating things. friends, there is an alternative.
enter marcella hazan's three-ingredient tomato sauce, which i'm embarrassed that i haven't shared with you sooner. of course she, the creator of my favorite smothered cabbage soup, would simplify an italian cornerstone with such elegance. here's what you do: you take a big ole can of whole peeled tomatoes, dump them in a pot with a knob of butter and a halved onion, and you cook the whole mess real slow for 45 minutes. next you take the onion out, devour it with pepper and flaky salt, and completely forget about your sauce. then you'll remember it and feel sort of guilty, and you'll carefully salt your sauce and then quietly spoon it over any surface that will hold still long enough for you to baptize it in tomato glory.
that's it. no garlic at all. not even olive oil. if, right about now, you're piping up with a "but olive oil has heart healthy unsaturated fats and a classic mediterranean flavor blah blah blah," that's your business. but just know that marcella makes no mistakes. this sauce tastes vibrantly clean, rich with butter but not slick or oily. the onion infusion is genius: you get a haunting allium backdrop without the textural interruption of chopped onion. what you really get is pure, gutsy, humming tomato taste like nothing from a can.
you can use it to elevate a lowly bag of dried pasta. if you're trying to impress your friends/family/crush/scary dinner guests, pool it over fresh, homemade pasta, no grated parmesan required. its higher calling, though, is pizza. while a lot of unreliable internet sources will tell you that pizza sauce is by definition more heavily spiced than pasta sauce, i'm a subscriber to just the opposite camp. traditional napoletana pizza, as i understand it, is sauced with straight up crushed san marzano tomatoes. marcella's deviates ever so slightly, but the theory remains the same: other flavors belong in toppings, not in sauce. so: if you want basil, dot your finished pizza with whole basil leaves. if you want garlic, throw on a few roasted cloves of garlic. if you want anchovies, tear up a few and sprinkle them on top of your pizza before sliding it in the oven.
then again, you could skip the pizza altogether and just squirrel away a double batch of sauce, because you never know when you'll need a midnight snack.
tomato sauce with butter and onion
adapted from marcella hazan's the essentials of classic italian cooking
makes enough sauce to lightly coat about a pound of spaghetti, or three smallish pizzas
- 28 oz (800 grams) whole peeled tomatoes from a can (san marzano, if you can find them, organic if you can't)
- 5 tbsp (70 grams) unsalted butter
- 1 medium yellow onion, peeled and halved
- salt to taste
remove pot from heat, discard the onion (hint: eat it), gently salt sauce to taste (you might find that your tomatoes came salted and that you don't need to add more) and keep warm while you prepare your pasta. serve with spaghetti, with or without grated parmesan cheese to pass.
No, not so strange--I too find myself sometimes slinging sauce back straight from the jar.
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