A Blend Of Fats Builds Flavor
Most pizza sauces start with a base of extra-virgin olive oil, which is fine, but there’s a better option. Is there anyone in the food world who has yet to hear about Marcella Hazan’s amazingly simple and delicious tomato sauce with onion and butter? Made by simply simmering tomatoes, butter, and a couple of onion halves , it produces an exceptionally smooth, complex, and delicious sauce.
French chefs have known for years that adding butter to a sauce can help round off the rough edges and give it a richer, fuller mouthfeel. This pizza sauce is no exception. Simply replacing one of the two tablespoons of extra-virgin olive oil I was using with unsalted butter added sweetness, complexity, and smoothness to my sauce without creating any extra work.
I also decided to use Marcella’s onion trick, further upping the sweetness.
Tom Colicchios New Pasta Sauces Look To Regional Italy
The sauce line is made in collaboration with Jersey Tomato Co. and includes options representing Piedmont, Calabria and more.
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Jarred or canned tomato sauces usually stick to classic preparations like marinara and tomato-basil. The chef Tom Colicchio, a New Jersey native, has a new sauce line produced in collaboration with the Jersey Tomato Co., which uses only New Jersey tomatoes. It looks to Italys regions for a collection of six distinctive sauces. All with chunky textures, they represent Piedmont with rich Barolo wine and sage begging for short ribs Sicily with white wine, orange and black olives Calabria with eggplant, zucchini and chiles for a bit of a kick Trentino with earthy wild mushrooms, rosemary and Parmesan Liguria with lemon, white wine and herbs and Abruzzo with saffron and fennel pollen. Liguria and Abruzzo are excellent with seafood.
Colicchio Collection, $45 for three 16 oz. jars or $38.25 for a bimonthly subscription, colicchiocollection.com.
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Its a real chefs flavor, Bastianich said. It takes work to get to the simplicity.
Everyone thinks you have to have a grandma in the kitchen, stirring for three hours, to make your own sauce, said Frank Prisinzano, who makes four different tomato sauces at his restaurant Sauce in the East Village. Marinara, after 25 minutes, its dead.
Back in the last century, when most Americans cooks had never heard of pasta , there was one kind of tomato sauce at the supermarket. It was smooth and sweet, came in a can and had a reliably faint onion flavor. Now there are hundreds.
Even basic sauce goes under many different names and can easily cost $10 a quart. Much better to buy a can of tomatoes and make your own.
There is nothing wrong with a slow-cooked sugo di pomodoro, a long-simmered smooth sauce with aromatics like onion and celery. Or the quick sauté of whole tomatoes, olive oil, minimal garlic and basil that produces pasta al pomodoro e basilico. Or a complex ragù, which often includes red meat and can cook for many hours, until the meat melts into the sauce.
But none of them is marinara, a simple combination that nonetheless requires a particular method and specific ingredients. If you usually buy jarred sauce, or think of tomato sauce as too basic to merit much attention, put Bastianichs precise recipe to the test.
Strictly speaking, marinara should not be served with cheese.
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The Time Is Right To Make Tomato Sauce
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Tomatoes are now at their ripest and reddest, just right for a batch of fresh tomato sauce.
Go ahead: get to work. It doesnt have to be a cellar full of sauce, with shelves and shelves of labeled Mason jars. Just make a small batch or three and freeze the stuff in zip-top bags. In a few months, youll be happy to have this tasty souvenir of summers sweetness. Or, for that matter, just make enough for a meal tonight.
Real, ripe tomatoes are at their cheapest now, too another reason to give tomato sauce a go. At the market, look for the large, cracked, ugly, slightly bruised tomatoes sold at a discount. The flesh of these tomatoes is dense, sweet and blood red. Use plum tomatoes if you prefer the main thing is they must be truly sun-ripened, whatever the variety.
This is a quick-cooking sauce with relatively fast preparation. Theres no need to blanch and peel tomatoes or even use a food mill. All you need is a hand-held grater. In a matter of minutes, youll be simmering a small saucepan full of gorgeous tomato pulp.
This makes a very fresh- and bright-tasting sauce in a manageable small batch. It doesnt cook for hours 15 to 20 minutes are really all it takes.
One of my favorites is this version I learned in Sicily, made with nothing more than tomato sauce and good ricotta, with a little pecorino.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/29/dining/marinara-worth-mastering.html 2/8 4/10/2018 Marinara Worth Mastering – The New York Times
The makings of a remarkable marinara sauce. Francesco Tonelli for The New York Times
Everyone thinks you have to have a grandma in the kitchen, stirring for three hours, to make your own sauce, said Frank Prisinzano, who makes four different tomato sauces at his restaurant Sauce in the East Village. Marinara, after 25 minutes, its dead.
Back in the last century, when most Americans cooks had never heard of pasta , there was one kind of tomato sauce at the supermarket. It was smooth and sweet, came in a can and had a reliably faint onion flavor. Now there are hundreds.
Even basic sauce goes under many different names and can easily cost $10 a quart. Much better to buy a can of tomatoes and make your own.
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Classic Marinara Sauce In Minutes
Once youve tasted this easy, quick marinara sauce, you may find that youve bought your last jar of store-bought sauce. The simplicity of this sauce is what makes it so special, and the fact that you can make it perfectly with canned tomatoes is the icing on the cake.
With a couple cans of tomatoes on hand, youll be able to whip up a batch of this sauce at a moments notice, and you can double or triple the recipe as needed to feed a hungry crowd. Trust us, it may take a bit longer than just operating the can opener , but its totally worth it!
What Is The Best Jarred Pasta Sauce Exclusive Survey
Pasta is the perfect weeknight dinner, made all the easier with a jar of ready-to-eat sauce. Sure, boiling boxed pasta and throwing in a can of whatever’s on hand may not channel the authenticity of Italian cuisine, which relies on simple, fresh ingredients. However, the convenience of jarred pasta sauce is undeniable and, if we’re being honest, it tastes great, too.
Clearly, lots of people agree. Go to any grocery store, and you’ll be inundated with sauce options: from meaty bolognese to cheesy alfredo or spicy. chili-based arrabiata. Once you settle on a type of sauce, choices are still to come every pasta sauce brand offers its own spin on standard recipes, presenting you with a dizzying number of choices. To make matters easy, go with your gut and pick a sauce based on your own preferences. You truly can’t go wrong.
Yet regardless of what you buy, your sauce of choice likely isn’t Italian. Many if not most of America’s favorite sauces are just that: American. According to Business Insider, alfredo, scampi, and even marinara are not traditional dishes. With their distinct, delicious flavors, however, they’ve become staples of Italian-American cuisine that are here to stay.
One such hallmark of Italian-American sauces amassed the greatest number of fans, according to Tasting Table’s latest findings. Over half of the 615 people Tasting Table surveyed prefer one kind of sauce to any other.
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/10/2018 Marinara Worth Mastering
The first thing to know about marinara: its not a synonym for tomato sauce.
Marinara is very specific, says Oretta Zanini de Vita, who has just published a very specific cookbook on how to pair pasta shapes with pasta sauces. Tomato sauce is a completely different thing.
Its all about quick, and light, and feeling the tomatoes in your mouth, said Lidia Bastianich, who recently published her 12th book on the food of Italy, Lidias Commonsense Italian Cooking .
Real marinara sauce has the taste and juice of fresh tomato, but also a velvety texture and the rich bite of olive oil: even the best jarred sauces cant pull that off. And because it comes together from pantry ingredients before the pasta water even comes to a boil, its a recipe that home cooks should master.
What Sets Marinara Apart From Other Tomato Sauces
In addition, most marinara sauces also contain red pepper flakes or some sort of chili to add a touch of heat but if you’re sensitive to heat, they can certainly be omitted. Bastianich further differentiates between the sauces on her website, stating that “marinara is a quick sauce,” whereas tomato sauce “is a more complex affair,” that even sometimes contains meat. She categorizes the flavor of marinara as “fresh,” while traditional tomato/pomodoro sauce is “sweeter and more complex.” Cooked pasta should also always be tossed in the pan with the sauce the sauce should not be “heaped on top.” Any noodle is fine to serve with marinara, from the basics like spaghetti and ziti, to more outlandish shapes. Lastly, it’s noted that is not traditionally served with cheese , which is certainly a bummer for all of the cheese fanatics out there.
At its basis, marinara is a perfect ‘weeknight meal,’ in that it should take no more than 25 minutes, the prep work is minimal, and the pasta also cooks during that time. While marinara traditionally adorns pasta, there are obviously a multitude of other uses for it, from pizza to shakshuka. Although the minute specifics differentiating marinara sauce from other ‘red sauces’ are myriad, it’s impossible to go wrong with any combination of olive oil, garlic, tomato, salt, and a mix of herbs, no matter how it’s prepared and served.
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Use Fresh Basil Sprigs Preferably Not The Overgrown Jack
If possible, use a small dried chile instead of flakes from a jar, which include the bitter seeds. Fish it out of the sauce and discard at the end.
And now, to the tomatoes. If you happen to live near Mount Vesuvius, by all means use ripe local tomatoes. If not, canned are almost certainly your best option.
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/29/dining/marinara-worth-mastering.html 5/8 4/10/2018 Marinara Worth Mastering – The New York Times
Pure Your Own Canned Tomatoes
Serious Eats / J. Kenji López-Alt
I knew that I wanted to use canned tomatoes, since they are much more consistent year round. But which tomatoes should I use? Pretty much every brand has five offerings:
So diced tomatoes are too firm, crushed tomatoes are too inconsistent, and tomato purée and paste are too cooked. This left me with the whole canned tomatoes. I opted for those packed in juice, giving them a quick whir with my immersion blender to purée them right after I added them to the pot.
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Fresh Herbs Aren’t Always Best
Serious Eats / J. Kenji López-Alt
Most recipes call for either dried oregano or dried “Italian seasoning,” which is mostly dried oregano and basil. My immediate thought was to replace the dried herbs with fresh. Imagine my surprise when after cooking two sauces side-by-side, one with dried oregano, and another with fresh, there was barely any difference at all.
Many chefs assert that fresh herbs are superior to dried herbs, and they’re rightsome of the time. Most herbs contain flavor compounds that are more volatile than water, which means that any drying process that removes water also ends up removing flavor.
“rosemary, marjoram, bay leaf, thyme, and sage fare similarly well in the drying process.”
But it’s not always the case, and here’s why. Savory herbs that tend to grow in hot, relatively dry climateslike oregano, for instancehave flavor compounds that are relatively stable at high temperatures and are well-contained within the leaf. They have to be, in order to withstand the high temperatures and lack of humidity in their natural environment. Other arid-climate herbs like rosemary, marjoram, bay leaf, thyme, and sage fare similarly well in the drying process.
I found that as long as I made sure to cook the dried herbs for long enough to soften their texture , the flavor I got out of them was just as good as using freshand a whole lot cheaper and easier.
Final Steps For Balanced Flavor
Serious Eats / J. Kenji López-Alt
The best tomatoes should have high levels of both acidity and sweetness the best sauces will have those flavors as well, but they need to be in balance. Slow cooking is the best way to achieve it.
Canned tomatoes invariably have some citric acid added to them in order to increase their acidity. Slowly reducing the puréed tomatoes on the stovetop not only creates new flavor compounds, adding complexity to the sauce, but it also gets rid of water content, intensifying the flavors that are already there.
One other reason to go slow: If you aren’t really careful, high heat can cause unwanted browning, created roasted, caramel notes in your sauce. This isn’t a good thing. I tend not to be careful, so I hedge my bets by keeping the heat minimal.
After an hour of slow simmering, the sauce was nearly perfect, but was missing a couple of key elements. A little extra sugar helped to balance out the newly-intensified acidity, and a pinch of pepper flakes added a not-overwhelming level of heat. Cooking a new batch and adding the pepper flakes to sauté in the butter-olive oil mixture right from the beginning made it even better.
In the end I had a sauce with just the right balance of flavor for my New York-style pies. Sweet, a little hot, and intensely savory, with a texture that helps it meld in beautifully with the cheese, the way a good pie should. And here’s a non-shocker: It’s also good served with pasta.
Serious Eats / J. Kenji López-Alt
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The Biggest Mistake You’re Probably Making With Marinara Sauce
Is there anything more beautiful than a fresh, red marinara sauce full of rich flavor? The ubiquitous Italian sauce is applied to everything from pizza dough to pasta and used as a dipping sauce for mozzarella sticks. The easiest option may be to grab one of the dozens of jarred pasta sauces at the grocery store to heat up and use in your home cooking, but then you are missing out on lots of deliciousness and freshness.
A homemade marinara sauce is easy to make and very rewarding, according to The New York Times, which shares a basic classic marinara recipe inspired by how the sauce is made in southern Italy. The recipe created by chef Lidia Bastianich calls for canned whole San Marzano tomatoes, olive oil, garlic cloves, fresh basil, salt, and red pepper flakes. Since classic marinara sauce is only comprised of a few ingredients, it’s crucial that all of the ingredients are high quality. Bastianich suggests using D.O.P San Marzano tomatoes if possible, which means “Protected Designation of Origin,” and certifies that the tomatoes are truly from the San Marzano strain.
Taste of Home’s marinara sauce recipe also calls for canned San Marzano tomatoes because they do not contain as much water or moisture as other varieties and have a slightly acidic flavor. Once you have all of your ingredients squared away and you’re ready to start cooking, you’re not home free yet, because you have to avoid this common cooking pitfall.
This Is Where The Flavor Of Marinara Sauce Comes From
Called marinara, pomodoro, ‘red sauce,’ and even the oft-debated ‘gravy’ in certain regions these names are used interchangeably to describe a wide variety of tomato-based sauces, and there are many subtle differences between a standard tomato sauce and marinara. Marinara sauce is regaled and has a storied history, but it’s easy to mix up with other Italian and Italian-American tomato-centric sauces, so we hope this can clarify those subtle variations.
The Daily Meal states that “mariner’s sauce originated in Naples,” and The New York Times notes that when translated, ‘alla marinara’ means “of the sailor.” There are a slew of tales behind what this name might mean, but the true origins are debated. In The New York Times, Julia Moskin says that “marinara became a catchall term for tomato sauce in this country,” and that “true marinara” contains “no onions, no wine, no meatballs, no anchovies, no tomato paste, and no butter,” and that it should be finished cooking within 25 minutes it’s not a sauce that should be cooking on the stove all day long. Moskin also speaks with Lidia Bastianich, who includes some additional tips: cook marinara in a skillet, not a saucepan, and use super-fresh olive oil, lightly crushed garlic cloves, basil sprigs, dried oregano, salt, and the highest quality tomatoes. While many recipes swear by San Marzano tomatoes, Taste of Home notes that any variety of plum tomato will do.
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