It has come to my attention that many people are buying tomato sauce in jars, even though making your own is laughably easy. We must rectify this.
6 tablespoons olive oil
1 1/2 cups onion, chopped fine
1 can plum tomatoes (I use Cento)
1 can Hunt's tomato paste
2 cloves garlic
1 small package fresh basil
1 tablespoon sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
Pepper to taste
In a heavy pot, saute the onion in the olive oil over medium heat for five minutes, until soft. (You don't want to brown them). Puree the other ingredients in a food processor or blender. (If you like your sauce chunky, just chop it all fine). Add tomato mixture to the onions and lower the heat to its lowest setting. Cook over low heat 40 minutes to an hour. (Taste it after forty minutes, and keep cooking if it still tastes too raw). Serve over pasta.
This sauce keeps well, freezes well, can be easily doubled or tripled, and costs a fraction of what jar sauce does. It's also about a zillion times better. And it takes two dishes and less than ten minutes of active prep time. What's not to love?
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And you buy your fresh tomatoes.. in cans? In paste form? Plum tomatoes too! Dear God, make it stop! This is appallingly illogical, even by your recent McCainesque standards of blogging. Use fresh tomatoes, girl!
A sad state of affairs, no? Given that you're vegan or vegetarian or whatever, you probably don't have many meatball or meatsauce tips, eh?
Canned tomatoes are better than fresh 9 or 10 months out of the year everywhere, and 12 months out of the year in the many urban areas where there are no affordable local farmer's markets. And paste gives the sauce body.
"1 can Hunt's tomato paste"
No canned San Marzano tomatoes in your neck of the woods?
You might want to be a bit more specific about what a small package of fresh basil is. That varies from country to country, from supermarket to supermarket.
1/4 cup basil leaves sounds about right.
Thanks for the recipe...it's nice to have defined proportions; I usually just mix stuff until it tastes right, which can sometimes take way too many iterations. I like using brown sugar instead of regular (white) sugar,as I think it results in a richer flavor.
Geoff:
I'll chime in!
For meatballs, add an extra 1/2 cup of onions and 2 cloves of garlic to the saute, then reserve about a quarter of the mixture before adding tomato to the pot. I'd use about 1 1/2 lb each of ground beef and pork, plus about 1/4 cup Parmesan cheese, the reserved aromatics, and a liberal seasoning with salt, fennel, oregano, black pepper, and red pepper flakes, well combined, rolled into balls and browned in olive oil before simmering in the sauce for a least an hour. For safety, I'd use a thermometer to check internal temperatures.
For a very good vegetarian version (which is what I make now), substitute a 50/50 mix of (neutrally seasoned) falafel mix and dry wheat gluten, lose the egg, then work in water and a hefty dose of olive oil. I've had people fail to notice that this lacked meat. To take it vegan, drop the cheese, but I'd recommend adding in some pungent yeast protein or other zesty flavoring to make up the lack.
Except that 10 minutes is worth $3.30 at $20/hr, which is about what what a can of Tomato sauce costs.
Totally agree with Megan.
Canned tomatoes are better than fresh tomatoes 9 months out of the year in most areas, and 12 months in some markets.
Also, cooking tomato paste is a good way to get roast tomato flavor quickly.
Sugar? You're so Irish.
No harm I am too.
One of my favorite recipes when I am eating by myself is to buy a can of the hunt's oven roasted diced tomatoes, a can of chicken broth, and a couple chicken legs. Poach the chicken legs in a mixture of the tomatoes, broth, water, and seasonings of your choice (garlic, basil, try some cumen for a kick). Remove the chicken and reduce what remains to a sauce. Pull the chicken off the bone, mix the meat with the sauce, serve over pasta with some romano or parmesan.
Costs around $5 if you have the cheese and seasonings lying around, comes out to about 1.5 portions, and is delicious.
This sauce keeps well, freezes well, can be easily doubled or tripled, and costs a fraction of what jar sauce does.
I usually wait for sales, and can pick up decent pasta sauce for $2.00 and never more than $2.50 a jar. A quick head calculation of costs has this around $2.00 to make. Purchased also has the advantage of being in a jar so it doesn't require any special storage conditions. I also get a nice jar at the end of it, which I use to store various bulk ingredients.
This may be tastier overall, but I doubt it's really that much cheaper and it certainly takes far more time.
The reason to buy tomato sauce in jars is that the only reason to eat food with tomato sauce on it is that you are poor.
A few variations and hints:
Cover the onions for the first few minutes of cooking, helps sweat the moisture out of them; try replacing them with shallots (delicious and delicate); brown the onions or shallots slowly (really slowly) to bring out their sugars then deglaze the pan 3 times with red wine for a more complex, meaty-tasting sauce.
Try adding a pinch of red-pepper to the onions for a spicier sauce, fennel seed for a more "Italian tasting" sauce.
During tomato season, replace the canned tomatoes with fresh tomatoes, roasted in the oven to sweat out their juices; remove the skins before using.
And my family's favorite raw-tomato pasta salad: quartered grape tomatoes, olive oil, black olives, garlic, and toasted pine nuts and fresh basil tossed with pasta shells.
Instead of the sugar you can try Mario Batali's trick - 1/2 medium sized carrot shredded and cooked at the same time as the onion. It will add the sweetness needed to balance the acidity of the tomato without being cloying like sugar tends to be. I would also leave the garlic cloves whole (or lightly crushed with the side of your knife to release) and toss them in with the oil - lightly browned garlic tastes (and smells) much better than little pieces of raw garlic that boil in the liquid...
Oh, and don't just "serve over pasta" - you need to have your portion of sauce heating in a pan big enough to accomodate your drained pasta. Pull your pasta out a minute before it is "done" and drop it in the pan with the sauce and raise the heat while you stir. The pasta will continue to cook in the sauce and absorb it so the noodle and condiment combine in harmony as one...you don't want it to look like a cartoon spaghetti with a glop of sauce on top, it should be dressed like salad. Last trick - reserve about a cup of the water your pasta cooked in and add it a little at a time if your pasta/sauce looks a little dry. The starch in the pasta water gives it that extra sensual mouth feel and you will begin to think of it as an ingrediant in itself.
"What's not to love?"
The canned taste that anything gets when its been packed in a can. If you've eaten canned foods so long you don't notice it, good for you.
But that metallicky tangy taste you get with every bite is a bit too much for people who have either used fresh tomatoes, or bottled tomatoes (home bottled or store bought).
Usually I can get away with the can of paste if I combined it with bottled tomatoes instead of canned ones.
Onion, without carrot or celery? Sacre bleu!
Also, I add a hefty dollop of miso paste — a couple of tablespoons? — to the sauce. It adds body, especially if I'm making a meatless batch.
The heck? This is the strangest comment I've ever seen on this blog. Tomato sauces are used in fine dining and eaten by rich people all the time. Spaghetti with canned Ragu doesn't make something like mussells marinara "cheap" or unrefined. Poor people also eat a lot of macaroni and cheese; that sure doesn't mean only poor people eat food with cheese sauces.
What size can of tomato paste? The little bitty one or the 14(ish)-ounce one?
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Oh, but Megan can? This recipe is adequate but by "costs a fraction of what jar sauce does," she'd better mean the fraction is 1:1. By the time you buy the canned tomatoes, paste, and fresh basil, you're out probably more than the three bucks a jar of Paul Newman's (not bad) marinara costs.
Also, using garlic without sauteeing it is ub-zerd. That's why it will taste "raw."
And what Zic said: red pepper flakes and fennel seed (say, half a tsp.) And a dash of balsamic.
The small tomato paste, Barbara. And forget Hunt's. Renzi, if you can find it. Otherwise Contadina.
I recommend Heidi Swanson's (of 101 Cookbooks fame) delicious and quick Five Minute Tomato sauce recipe - http://tinyurl.com/ypls83
My wife has a low flash point so I cut the amount of red pepper flakes in half and the suace is still plenty spicy hot.
Years ago Consumer Reports reviewed canned tomato sauces. Some of the best were the ones that are usually on the lowest shelf - Hunts and DelMonte. Not the plain sauces but the ones with lots of stuff in them. Favorites right now are the ones that are described as chunky, usually some variant of "onion" and or "garlic" in the name. I buy them on sale for less than a dollar. Definitely not as good as something made with fresh tomatoes but not all that different than something concocted at home with canned tomatoes and tomato paste. Takes ten minutes less than Megan's recipe because hers also involves opening cans.
Honey instead of sugar (white or brown) gives it a richer flavor.