One of the first things I learned how to cook as a kid was a basic tomato sauce (a.k.a. marinara sauce). It’s the basis for so many dishes and sauces from lasagna to eggplant parmesan, and despite its apparent simplicity, it’s actually quite complex. What you add to the sauce and how you treat each addition can create wildly different variations of the same sauce.
Now that I teach cooking, it’s one of the first dishes I teach my students. I feel a bit like Mr Miyagi teaching Daniel-san to wax-on wax-off when I make a student cook a batch of tomato sauce for the umpteenth time, but what you learn from making a good tomato sauce forms a foundation that can be used universally across dishes and cuisines.
Beyond the obvious stuff, like knife skills, and the importance of the Maillard reaction, I make tomato sauce a foundation of my culinary curriculum because to make a good tomato sauce, you have to understand the nuances of, and be able to balance, the five basic tastes: saltiness, sweetness, tartness, bitterness and umami.
I could call this the best tomato sauce recipe ever, but because ingredients and kitchens vary, there’s a good chance your tomato sauce isn’t going to turn out exactly like mine. Even if you were able to buy exactly the same ingredients as me and use the same equipment, you and I have different palettes and so what’s perfect for me, may be too sweet or under-salted for you.
This is what cooking with no recipes is all about, it’s about understanding the balance of tastes that you prefer and then being able to make dishes that fit that profile. My students don’t hire me to teach them to ace a dish, or even to master an entire cuisine, they pay me to teach them how to cook everything well.
While there’s no way I could possibly distill everything there is to know about balancing tastes in a blog post (or even a book), I will give you my basic tomato sauce recipe, along with a few pointers so that you can begin your journey towards finding your best tomato sauce.
As someone who’s so insistent on cooking from scratch you rarely see me calling for a can of anything. Tomatoes are one exception for a few reasons. The first is that for most of the year it’s impossible to get good ripe tomatoes. Quality canned tomatoes are usually harvested at their best before being canned so for most of the year, a canned tomato is going to taste a lot better in a sauce than a fresh one. The second reason is that using canned tomatoes is a lot faster because they’ve already been peeled and stewed.
To further cut back on cooking time, without sacrificing the rich tomato flavor a long simmer builds, I like to add tomato paste to my sauce. You’ll immediately notice a difference in color when you add the concentrated tomato and the change in taste is just as apparent. It’s kind of like being able to add two tablespoons of time travel to your sauce which magically fast-forwards it 40 minutes into the future.
The other part of a tomato sauce that takes a long time to get right is caramelizing the onions. This is the part where the Maillard reaction turns pungent tear-inducing onions into sweet umami laden bits of flavor through the application of heat over time. Properly caramelizing diced onions can take about 30 minutes, but you can dramatically speed this up just by dicing the onions into smaller 1/8-inch pieces (technically called a brunoise)
Lastly on the balance of tastes, there are a lot of levers to pull to change the sauce’s profile, but perhaps the most effective one is to add a little sugar. That’s because most of the time what makes a tomato sauce taste unbalanced is that the tomatoes are too tart. A small amount of sugar has a way of taking the sharp edge off of a sour tomato sauce in the same way it turns a glass of undrinkable lemon water into delicious lemonade.
Ingredients
- 2 tablespoons olive oil
- 155 grams onion (~1 large onion, finely diced)
- 15 grams garlic (~2 large cloves, finely minced)
- 800 grams whole stewed tomatoes (~1 large can)
- 2 tablespoons tomato paste
- 6.7 grams salt (~1 teaspoon)
- 1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper
- 15 grams basil (~15 large leaves roughly chopped)
Steps
- Put the olive oil, onions and garlic in a pan and saute over medium high heat while stirring constantly until the onions are a medium brown and have reduced to about half their original volume (about 5-7 minutes).
- Add the tomatoes, tomato paste, basil, salt and pepper. Turn down the heat to medium low. Simmer for 10-20 minutes or until the sauce has the consistency you're looking for.
- Taste the sauce. If it tastes a little bland and lacking in umami, try adding more salt. If you find the sauce is tasting too sour, try adding up to two teaspoons of sugar.
Notes:
Thanks, Marc, for pointing out that the canned tomatoes will be more consistent year round. Some of the imported Italian Roma Tomatoes are worth the extra cost in flavor, too.
Great article and recipe. A simple tomato sauce is one of the most comforting things in life. I like to eat it spooned over mashed potato (when I can’t be bothered making gnocci) and it was one of my favourite hangover cures in my 20’s. I like to add red wine vinegar because I think vinegar and tomatoes are best friends that should never be sperated. Other times I add anchovies, depending on mood/level of botherdness. etc.
For a quick vegan spaghetti idea add some red lentils at the start of step two. This freezes really well too.
Great suggestions Osita! That’s one of the beauties of a basic tomato sauce it can be morphed into so many other dishes just by adding something to it.
For sure – so cheap and quick, it really is one of the foundational must-know recipes. Thanks for this blog!
Hi Marc! I also use basically the same ingredients and some sugar (to help knock down the acidity). And I love the big cans of petit diced at COSTCO as they’re priced very low compared to a normal grocery store… So I make enough for to meals and freeze half. I think the best way to get consistently good sauce is in a crock pot… Because with sauce, time is Cash Money! On low for 6 hours comes out perfect every time, and it never tastes rushed. Just stir a couple of times during the process. If I’m in a… Read more »
Hi Willbo, I agree that simmering a sauce for hours makes a difference, but the thing is most people don’t have that much time, especially when they’re going to use the sauce in something else. The idea behind my technique is that you can make an amazing sauce that’s 95% as good in less than 30 minutes instead of 6 hours.
Gotcha. I just try to plan ahead. And because it’s a crock I don’t
have to watch it or worry about a stove. To me it’s convenient but only
if I plan ahead. If I forget to start the sauce, I just see what I have and make something
else, like that wonderful scratch chicken teriyaki you posted some
months back. We love it… make it all the time. Started keeping mirin
and sake in the house just for that reason. BTW, YOU ROCK! Thx.
Hi Marc, does a large can Tomatoes in the US contain 800 gram pure tomatoes or also water? In Germany an 800g can of tomatoes got round about 300g water.
Hi Herr Yamamoto, I use Italian tomatoes so it should be the same, but the can contains tomatoes and is packed with the juices of the tomato (not water). Hope that helps.
haha yes i meaned juice not water, my fault. Thanks Mark.