We here at ONK love love love our pasta, but we do not love the red substance that large factories put into jars and call pasta sauce. I’m not saying I never use it. I admit I do in a pinch, but most of the time when we want pasta I will put in the leg work for some homemade marinara, free of many of the chemicals added to your standard grocery store fare.
You can use unseasoned diced canned tomatoes. In fact, some people swear by the sauce made with canned tomatoes. Personally, and I think ComputerNerd agrees, I like fresh tomatoes. They need a little more work but the sauce is so much better. To use fresh tomatoes you have to skin them. It’s a fairly simple process, and we’ll cover it elsewhere on the site. If you use canned tomatoes there are a few things you need to consider. First there is more liquid than from fresh tomatoes. This means you will have to simmer the sauce longer to achieve the same consistency. Additionally, canned tomatoes contain a lot of salt (most varieties have over 200 mg sodium/half cup), so you probably won’t need to add any additional salt. In fact, one of the reasons I shy away from using canned tomatoes in my pasta sauce is because of the salt. The sauce I made always felt too salty without adding any additional salt to the recipe. In just a quick google search I found Del Monte makes a low sodium canned tomato that only has 50 mg sodium per half cup. Still I’m going to stick with my fresh tomatoes (yeah I know I’m stubborn).
Marinara sauce is another example of a recipe that gets a bad rep. It is not as hard as it’s made out to be. The main difficulty is waiting for it to finish simmering, and even that does not take that much time. If you are concerned about the time you are taking to make pasta sauce, make a ton and freeze it in bags in family-meal-sized portions.
Homemade Marinara:
- 2 Tablespoons olive oil
- 6 pounds tomatoes, peeled and chopped (I use beefsteak here because they are what I had. I would normally use roma.)
- 1 large onion, chopped
- 8 cloves of garlic, minced
- 1 cup red wine
- 1 Tablespoon sea salt
- 1 teaspoon pepper, fresh ground
- 2 Tablespoons dried basil or 1/4 cup fresh basil, minced
- 1 Tablespoon dried oregano
- 1/2 Tablespoon dried parsley
Heat your oil in a large pot over medium heat. Add the onions and garlic, sauté until onions are translucent (do not allow the onions or garlic to brown). Add the spices and herbs, mixing well. Deglaze your pan with red wine and cook until 1/2 the liquid evaporates. Add the tomatoes and mix well. Turn the heat down to low and simmer your sauce over low heat for at least 30 minutes, until tomatoes are soft but still maintain most of their structural integrity (don’t cook them to mush).
For this batch, I puréed the sauce with a hand blender until there were no large chunks of tomatoes remaining because I plan to use it for a lasagna later (keep a look out here for the recipe!)
