Adding Flavor To The Sauce With Leaves: Basil Or Tomato
So, now that I’ve explained my three-pronged approach to the sauce, we’re basically done, right? Nope!
Just because I have my amazing tomato paste and my fresh-and-fruity purée doesn’t mean I’m just going to accept that the bulk of the sauce is going to taste merely good, especially if there’s anything I can do about it.
The first trick is one we’ve all seen a million times: Toss in some basil. It’s no accident that basil is usually included in canned tomatoes. Canning requires intense heat and cooking, which kills any trace of fresh tomato flavor. A few sprigs of basil help add back a little freshness. I added some basil to a portion of my bulk sauce while it was still warm and let it steep.
It worked, adding a fragrant, floral, anise-y scent to the sauce that was totally wonderful. At the very least, it’s worth steeping the basil in the sauce.
Some folks, though, also add some tomato leaves to their sauce. Writes McGee, “Tomato leaves have a fresh-tomato aroma thanks to their leaf enzymes and prominent aromatic oil glands.”
In case you’re worried that the leaves are poisonous, no need to fear: Not only are they not toxic, but they can bind with cholesterol and possibly lower how much of it our bodies absorb. Bonus!
I tried it out, and, aside from the risk of putting way too much in the sauce, found that it does indeed add a grassy, green flavor that can help offset whatever fresh notes are lost from cooking the tomato.
How To Make Tomato Sauce From Scratch
This article was co-authored by Linda McNally. Linda Ingaldson McNally is a Personal Chef & Nutritionist and the Co-Founder of Sage Home Chef based in Portland, Oregon. Linda and her team specialize in personalized meal preparation and create seasonal menus to accommodate various dietary restrictions. She has extensive knowledge in nutrition relating to women’s health, mindful eating, and therapeutic diets. Sage Home Chef won the AI Business Excellence Awards for Oregon’s Best Healthy Cuisine Personal Chef Services and Best of Portland Personal Chef Services in 2022. Linda has a degree in Journalism, Social Justice, and Family Studies from the University of St. Thomas and earned an MS in Nutrition from the National University of Natural Medicine in Portland. This article has been viewed 31,045 times.
Tomato sauce from scratch means making the sauce using fresh ingredients, including the tomatoes. That may seem difficult, but once you know how to prepare the tomatoes, making the sauce isn’t that difficult. That means you can impress your family and friends with this tasty, homemade sauce whenever the mood strikes.
Whats The Difference Between Italian Tomato Sauce Vs Sunday Gravy Vs Marinara Sauce
- For Jack, an Italian Tomato Sauce is a tomato-based sauce that simmers for a long time on the stove so that the flavors really deepen and develop.
- A Sunday Gravy recipe is a tomato sauce cooked along with a variety of meats including meatballs, spare ribs, sausage, and pork chops, so the sauce picks up additional flavor from the meat.
- Finally, is also a tomato-based sauce, but its a quickly-cooked sauce, yielding a bright, fresh tomato flavor.
- And since were talking about all types of tomato sauces we also have a Roasted Tomato Pizza Sauce recipe AND an Easy No-Cook Pizza Sauce recipe you might be interested in checking out too. Pizza sauces typically have a bold flavor that is meant to both complement and shine through the flavors of the dough, cheese and toppings on a pizza.
Todays recipe is originally inspired by a version of Italian Tomato Sauce that Jack grew up with, and he credits his Aunt Mary for this recipe, plus some additional influences from the sauce that Jacks father used to make. If you happen to be growing San Marzano Pomodoro tomatoes in your garden definitely use those! However, if fresh tomatoes arent available, we think some of the best San Marzano Pomodoro canned tomatoes are made by Cento and Pastene and both brands are readily available at most local grocery stores.
Mangia!
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Authentic Italian Tomato Sauce
Published: by Emily This post may contain affiliate links.
An easy Italian tomato sauce made from scratch with just 4 ingredients in only 10 minutes! This tomato sauce is perfect for pasta, pizza or simply for dunking some char-grilled ciabatta into. It’s SO rich in flavour and couldn’t be easier!
There are endless recipes for Italian tomato sauce. Some are made with fresh tomatoes and simmered for hours, some add chilli peppers to make a firey arrabbiata or pancetta for richness.
This recipe is very quick and easy, made with very few ingredients but trust me when I say it’s INCREDIBLY delicious! The flavour comes from a quick simmer which caramelises the sugars in the tomatoes giving the sauce the most delicious flavour in a short amount of time.
High-quality tomatoes are a MUST for this and are the only way to achieve a delicious tasting sauce. The short cooking time also only works for a small amount of sauce . The more tomato you add the more cooking time they’ll need.
Choosing Tomatoes For Sauce: Big Boys Are Best
Any tomato that tastes good can be used to make tomato sauce its really that simple. Romas and other paste tomatoes are often recommended for canning because they generally have more flesh with less juice and fewer seeds. However, they are smaller , and I often find that their flavor isnt as good as other tomatoes. I used Big Boy tomatoes your basic summer slicing tomato and couldnt be happier. If you like what you start with, youll like what you finish with.
Another factor to consider is the cost. Anything more than a dollar a pound and the cost-effectiveness of this project starts to plummet. A friend of mine who tries to can around 180 pounds of tomatoes each summer says she doesnt pay much attention to the particular tomato variety she just picks up what she can find for cheap. This often means buying in bulk directly from farms or picking your own or, even better, growing your own if you can!
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The Trouble With Fresh Tomato Sauce
First, I want to admit something: Making sauce from fresh summer tomatoes has long been an insecurity of mine, despite years of cooking experience, including working as a sous chef in a Tuscan restaurant in New York and living and working on farms in Italy for extended periods, elbows deep in fresh-picked tomatoes and the sauce we made from them.
The reason why: There are two primary goals when making fresh tomato sauce, and they’re at odds with each other.
- First, the sauce should taste like it was made from fresh tomatoes, which means it should have the bright, fruity aroma and flavor of uncooked fruit. If we don’t have this, we might as well throw in the towel and stick with canned tomatoes 365 days of the year.
- Second, the sauce should have a good, sauce-like consistency and have deep, sweet notes, which means cooking off much of the tomatoes’ natural water content and caramelizing the fruit’s natural sugars. Otherwise, it’s going to be too thin and tart.
The trouble is that retaining the tomatoes’ fresh flavor means minimal cooking, while getting rid of the excess water content and caramelizing the sugars means extended cooking. Everyone has a different solution to this dilemma.
Of those approaches, the divide-and-conquer concept has always made the most sense to me, but I’d never settled on exactly how to do it. To figure it out, I started with the first, obvious question: What kind of tomato should we use?
Cooking The Sauce: Three Different Ways
One of the goals I outlined above for fresh-tomato sauce is that it should retain some of that fresh-tomato flavor. So I knew I wanted some of my tomato purée to be cooked minimally. But one of the things my initial test batches made me think about is how damned delicious long-cooked tomatoes are.
You see, when I was cooking down my beefsteak-tomato purée, I had to cook it a long, long time to get rid of all of its excess water, and by the time it was done, it was sooooo delicious: dark red, intensely sweet, and oh so rich. I just kept going back to it with a spoon.
To get that flavor into my sauce, I consulted several cookbooks, and settled on the idea of turning a portion of the purée into a tomato pastelike extract in the oven, called estratto in Italian. It’s a technique described well by Paul Bertolli in his fantastic Cooking by Hand, and by Rosetta Costantino in My Calabria, and, while it’s traditionally done in the southern Italian sun, a low oven is the easy alternative.
Because so much evaporation is required to reach the concentrated stage I was going for here, I used only paste tomatoes for this portion of the recipeI’d rather let the small portion of beefsteaks in the batch contribute their water elsewhere than have to cook it all off here. Overall, a little less than half of my tomatoes went toward this component .
The low-and-slow reduction allows the tomato sugars to caramelize, creating an intensely sweet, concentrated flavor base for the sauce.
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How To Store Tomato Sauce
Where do you store tomato sauce?
Its a controversial question, indeed!
I store my sauce in the fridge once its opened. Others store it in the cupboard. Which way is the right way?
Well, even the experts at Australias Choice cant agree.
They say that tomato sauce is high enough in sugar and salt to be shelf stable, even after opening. However, bacteria is more of a risk in a warmer environment.
Some are willing to take the risk, saying cold sauce is a crime and impacts the flavour.
So, there seems to be no right and wrong.
If youre risk-averse and dont mind cold sauce, continue to store it in the fridge.
If youre a tomato sauce aficionado who insists on enjoying it at its room-temperature best, go ahead.
What do you store your sauce in?
Go for an airtight glass container to maximise its shelf life.
Once youve opened it, you can pour it from there or transfer it to a squeeze bottle yes, the ones we had in the 80s are still around today if you look hard enough.
Homemade Oven Roasted Sauce:
If you have extra time, roasting tomatoes in the oven makes a delicious and sweeter tomato sauce.
- If using fresh tomatoes, first peel and seed them. Blanch tomatoes in boiling water for 30 seconds then into a bowl of ice water. Peel and remove seeds with a knife.
- Chop 4 cups of peeled beefsteak, plum or cherry tomatoes or drain a 28 ounce can of diced tomatoes. Chop up a few cloves of garlic and add fresh or dried thyme leaves.
- Mix everything with 1 tablespoon of olive oil and add to a large baking pan. Cook at 350 degrees, stirring occasionally until the tomatoes are cooked through
- Blend together in a blender if you prefer a smoother sauce.
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The Question Of Aromatics: What To Add And How
One other major concern for the bulk sauce is whether to add aromatics like onion and garlic, and, if so, how to do it. Some recipes call for cooking the aromatics first until they’re soft and sweet , while others have you dump the aromatics in raw and simmer them in the sauce as it cooks.
I tried it three ways: with raw aromatics, with sautéed aromatics, and with none at all.*** In my tests, I used just onion and garlic, which are the most common, though you can opt to include others, like carrot and celeryeach will alter the flavor of the sauce somewhat, and whether or not you include them is a matter of personal preference.
*** Actually, four ways: I also did a batch with crushed red pepper, and loved the subtle warm heat it added to the sauce.
Sautéing the aromatics first produced a sauce that was sweeter and richer, with the aromatics melting more fully into the sauce.
Raw onion and garlic produced a cleaner-tasting sauce, with fresh-vegetable notes, but the overall flavor and texture were less integrated. To avoid the texture issue, you can use Marcella Hazan’s method of submerging raw onion halves in the simmering sauce and then fishing them out whole.
When blind-tasting these two sauces on spaghetti, more of my colleagues preferred the sautéed aromatics to the raw ones, but opinion wasn’t unanimous.
Technique Used To Make Homemade Tomato Sauce
- On a medium-high heat, add the olive oil to a big, deep pan.
- Add your celery, carrot, onion, and parsley to the pot.
- Simmer over low heat with a lid on for a few minutes, stirring regularly until the veggies are tender and cooked through.
- Toss in the garlic after removing the lid. Medium-high is the ideal setting for this recipe. Add garlic to the pan.
- If youre using canned whole tomatoes, be sure to include the juice as well as the tomatoes, which you may shred with your fingers.
- Put in the tomato paste and basil, and mix well. Incorporate salt and pepper according to your preference.
- Bring the mixture to a low boil, decrease the heat to a simmer, and cook, uncovered, for approximately 12 minutes until it thickens.
- If desired, you may purée the sauce in a processor to get a smoother texture.
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Homemade Ketchup In Just 5 Minutes
Homemade ketchup in just 5 minutes – Super easy to make, rich in flavour and definitely healthier than the store-bought version.
Probably the most famous tomato sauce in the world, ketchup is super versatile and can be used in a lot of different recipes.
Obviously, the best way to enjoy it is with french fries together with some good homemade mayonnaise.
An all-time favorite among kids and grown-ups, ketchup is a staple sauce for so many dishes, just think about chunky hot chips, hot dogs or burgers.
But have you ever tried making your own?
Fresh Tomato Sauce Recipe Ingredients
Lets talk tomatoes! To make this homemade tomato sauce recipe, youll need 3 pounds of medium tomatoes on-the-vine. Because we use so many fresh tomatoes in this recipe, I recommend making it in summer or early fall, when tomatoes are in season.
If you want to make homemade tomato sauce at another time of year, check out this marinara sauce recipe. It calls for canned crushed tomatoes instead of fresh ones.
Got your tomatoes? Heres what else youll need to make this recipe:
- Extra-virgin olive oil It adds richness and depth of flavor.
- Shallot and garlic They create the sauces savory base.
- Tomato paste It helps thicken the sauce and gives it an umami kick.
- Balsamic vinegar It adds a nice acidity.
- Cane sugar It offsets the acid of the tomatoes and vinegar, creating a delicious, well-balanced sauce.
- Dried oregano and fresh basil For fresh, aromatic flavor.
- Red pepper flakes They add a little heat.
- And salt and pepper To make all the flavors pop!
Find the complete recipe with measurements below.
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The Tomato Sauce Time Machine
I hadnt realised how much tomato sauce had changed over the years until I sampled Nana Lings tomato sauce recipe. A recipe shed jotted down in her beautiful handwriting back in 1941.
One tiny taste and I was immediately transported back to my familys dinner table in the 1980s.
I could see our old dinner table covered with a seersucker tablecloth. I could also see Mums hanging pot plant stand in the corner of the dining room . And on the table was a glass bottle filled with deep red tomato sauce.
These days, tomato sauce seems brighter and thinner.
And it may be in a super convenient squeeze pack now, but the taste just isnt quite the same. It doesnt pack a tomato punch the way the good old-fashioned tomato sauce did.
If you want tomato sauce thats thick, full of tomato flavour and can even take you back in time, keep scrolling for Nana Lings Tomato Sauce Recipe.
You can also find other wonderful condiments and conserves from the Cooking with Nana Ling collection here .
Homemade Tomato Sauce Serving Suggestions
Most often, I serve this fresh tomato sauce over pasta. Toss it with your favorite pasta shape for a flavorful, satisfying summer dinner. Tip: a few fresh basil leaves and some grated Parmesan really take this meal over the top.
Not in the mood for pasta? Not a problem! Here are a few more ways to use this sauce:
- On pizza. Make a classic Margherita, or add whatever toppings you like!
- Over polenta. Spoon it over creamy polenta for a hearty side dish, or add roasted broccoli or grilled zucchini to make it a meal.
- On zucchini noodles or spaghetti squash. We love these light, fresh pasta alternatives.
- In a meatball sub. Fill soft baguette with vegan meatballs and spoonfuls of the fresh tomato sauce!
Let me know what ideas you try!
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How To Thicken Tomato Sauce
Just like a chili recipe, the best way to thicken tomato sauce is to allow it to simmer. To thicken, be sure to keep the lid off as it simmers so the liquid can evaporate . Not only does it thicken but simmering also makes the sauce more flavorful!
Short on time? In a pinch you can thicken tomato sauce with a slurry by whisking a tablespoon of corn starch into 2 tablespoons of cold water . Slowly pour into the simmering sauce until you reach desired thickness.
