Making a red sauce
As the cost of everything has gone up over the last year, the place I’ve felt it the most is in food. While that’s certainly reflected in the weekly grocery bill, for me it’s been far more noticeable at restaurants. This is understandable — not only have they been impacted by the same inflation on food costs as home cooks, they also feel it across every other aspect of their overhead. Some of that gets passed down to the consumer, some the restaurant has to eat in its profit margins. Combine all that with a pandemic-fueled worker shortage and it’s no surprise we’ve seen so many restaurants close including, sadly, our favorite neighborhood spot for a fancy meal (despite being recognized as one of the best restaurants in the country).
In addition to the financial crunch many restaurant owners are facing, there’s also a heavy social cost to dumping all of the responsibility for making and delivering food onto often low-paid workers who very suddenly became “essential” during the pandemic. I’ve tried to be especially cognizant of them during this very strange, not-quite-post-COVID window we currently inhabit.
All of this is to say that, while it was already true before, cooking at home is as practical and essential a skill as ever, even as we swim in a glut of cheap delivery options. As such, one installment of Pretty Good each month will be devoted to an aspect of home cooking. If someone you know could use that in their lives, you know what to do with that button below.
And if you haven’t already subscribed, well, let me make that easy for you.
To my mind, there’s no better place to start than with something we make most weeks at our house, something I had long made one way, but changed my approach thanks to a pandemic-fueled recipe guide from our local pizza place.
Today, we’re making a red sauce. A pasta sauce, which you can spin any way you’d like, depending on what you’ve got on hand. If you cook at home, you may well already have a go-to sauce, whether it’s your Nona’s, or the one you’d refined over the years. That’s great, but do me a favor — try it this way. As I said, I also used to have another way of making pasta sauce. This one is better.
This is not a sauce made with fresh tomatoes. There is a time for that, from roughly late summer through mid-fall, when the tomatoes at farmers markets are brilliantly hued and plump and bursting with flavor. Use those, then. Use as many as you can. That is a different kind of sauce. This is the one that, thanks to the wonders of canning, you can make now, when the only available fresh tomatoes at the store were grown in greenhouses and taste like watery mush.
The base for this sauce is a total of four ingredients, plus salt and pepper. Seriously. Here they are.
1 28-ounce can whole, peeled tomatoes (preferably San Marzano, like Cento or Bianco di Napoli)
8 cloves garlic, sliced
4 tablespoons butter, sliced (plus two tablespoons reserved)
A couple shakes of red pepper flakes
“Butter?!?” I can hear some of you saying, throwing your hands up in disgust. Yes, butter. You’re making pasta, are you really calorie-counting here? Also, the key to this sauce is the preparation, which really depends on the next step. You’re going to need a Dutch oven, or another oven-safe pot (but really, a Dutch oven is best).
Preheat your oven to 425 degrees F
If you are making this exactly as is, with nothing else added, the red pepper flakes are great for a simple dash of heat. If I’m making a more complex version, I prefer a small spoonful of Calabrian chilis. If you want to make a sauce with, say, meat in it, you’ll start with that before we get to the tomatoes. Brown up your meat, sweat your vegetables, add any tomato/anchovy paste, and deglaze with wine, then you can dive into the rest of the recipe. All of these things are good, but none of them are necessary if you just want a simple red sauce. I’m also assuming you’re using this for pasta, in which case, grab a standard, one-pound box of whatever pasta you feel like or happen to have on hand. OK, where were we.
Smash tomatoes by hand into Dutch oven
These will squirt, and they will ruin your shirt, if you aren’t careful. Lower them in your hand below the rim of the pot, and gently squeeze them through your fingers until you’ve got a, frankly, not-terribly-appetizing-looking mess of mashed tomatoes and their liquid.
Scatter garlic and butter slices and push down to submerge in tomato liquid. Shake in red pepper flake, if using, and a pinch or two of salt
Once your oven beeps, throw your Dutch oven in, uncovered, and set a timer for 20 minutes. Now is a great time to fill a second pot with water and generously salt it, and to throw it on a burner on high to boil.
When your timer goes off, carefully pull your Dutch oven out and give everything a big stir, making sure you keep solids (garlic, meat/veggies if you’re using them) submerged so they don’t burn. Sock it back in the oven for another 20 minutes. In the meantime, time up your pound of pasta to go in your (boiling, or close to it) water pot no sooner than to where it will be two minutes shy of its cook time when your next timer goes off. So, if it’s an 8-10 minute pasta, drop it with six minutes to go on your oven timer. Got it?
When your second 20-minute timer goes off, turn off your oven and pull your Dutch oven up to the stove. Look at that sauce! It’s a much darker, deep brick red, and almost solid — jammy as hell, maybe even some charring on the sides of your pot. That’s good! All good. Give it a quick stir. When your pasta is still a minute shy of its official cook time, transfer it straight into your sauce pot and stir it in, adding your other couple tablespoons of butter. Grab a vessel that won’t melt and collect at least two cups of hot pasta water.
Stir your butter into the sauce until it butter melts, then start drizzling in pasta water. The residual heat from the Dutch oven should be enough, but you can always put your pot on very low heat to help everything come together. Keep stirring in pasta water, up to about a cup, until your sauce achieves a nice, glossy consistency, sticking to your noodles. If you happen to have Parmesan cheese lying around, grating some into your sauce as you go here will only add to that glossiness.
And, basically, that’s it. If you want to add more salt to taste, you can, though I generally prefer to just do that at the table. If you’ve got a nice olive oil, you can drizzle it over the served bowl, and toss some chopped herbs or a pinch of flaky salt on top to finish. But what you’ll have is a deep, rich, sauce, which has roasted any of the tinniness of the can away and fully pushed the sugars of the tomatoes forward.
If you’ve chosen to beef (or lamb, or chicken, or whatever) it up, you’ll have likely more than doubled the cost of ingredients, but you’ll also have four dinner-sized servings of at least mid-range restaurant-quality pasta for a total cost of about $15. Even if you only have one or two people in your house, this is a very good thing — the sauce will only continue to get better overnight, as the acidity from the tomatoes makes its way into everything else, making for great leftovers. And, speaking of leftovers: everything still left in your Dutch oven will continue to tighten up as it releases the rest of its heat. That’s why you saved an extra cup of pasta water. When you’re ready to put away leftover portions, stir enough of that into your sauce to where you think it actually might be just a little too watery. When you go to reheat it, you’ll be thankful you did.
The wonderful thing about this baseline sauce is both its simplicity and its utility. The only fresh ingredients are garlic and butter, both very common, cheap items that many people have around the house at all times and that both keep well. We always have cans of tomatoes and at least one kind of pasta on hand in the cupboard, something I highly recommend doing. This can easily become your “we don’t have any food in the house” antidote. It’s cheap, it’s easy, it’s largely hands-off, and if you’ve been trying to perfect your pasta sauce your entire adult life, you just might be a little furious you haven’t been doing it this way the whole time.
Great Noah. I love the squirt on your shirt reference. I always forget to put on an apron. Bev