Folks have been arguing over the best pasta sauce recipe for ages. Remember those commercials for Prego vs. Ragu? I’ve tried quite a few jarred brands myself, but nothing compares to this homemade pasta sauce. It gives you a nice, flavorful sauce that has a medium thickness. I prefer to use San Marzano tomatoes as they have the best, sweet flavor that is concentrated when cooked down. If you can’t find San Marzanos, then Romas or really any tomato will do. Heirloom tomatoes have a great flavor, but tend to be more juicy, which will give you a thinner sauce, while the Romas are a little more meaty with less seeds and juice. You’ll have to experiment yourself to find your favorites and you can also mix and match. Bonus points if you grow the tomatoes in your garden.
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Prepare to take about a half day to make this sauce, depending on how much you want to make and how many volunteers you can get to help with the chopping!. I like to double the recipe to make about 4 quarts of the sauce for storage. The pictures above show the fresh ingredients. Note the tomatoes that have been seeded. This is a really important step the make sure that you get a nice, thick sauce. I used to peel the skin from the tomatoes as well. The process was to score the top of tomato with a knife and then briefly boil the tomatoes whole until the skin started to peel, and then immediately submerge in an ice bath. The skin needed to then be manually removed. All of this was really time consuming, and I came to the realization that since I blend the sauce at the end, it really doesn’t matter if you remove the skin or not. In fact, the skin contains a lot of the vitamins of the tomato so it is beneficial to keep it in your sauce!
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- Cook the onions, garlic and carrots for 5-6 minutes
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- Add tomatoes and herbs
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- Look how much it cooks down in 2-3 hours!
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- Blend with an immersion blender
Once you have all of your ingredients prepped, it is a matter of letting the sauce cook down. I started with a stock pot filled almost all the way to the top and after about 3 hours it had cooked down by about 3 inches and thickened nicely. During the cooking time you can plan to give it a good stir every 30 minutes or so. Don’t forget to add a carrot piece for the last 30 minutes of cooking. This is a trick I learned that helps to remove some of the acidity from the sauce and sweetens it right up. The final step is to blend. You can make the sauce as chunky as you like – just cut back on the blending if you like to have more pieces in your sauce, and increase the blending time for a more smooth sauce. I prefer to use an immersion blender for this process. It is so convenient because you can blend it all at once rather than moving to a blender in batches. You can also do this while it is still semi hot, but be careful!! You have to make sure to keep the head of the immersion blender below the top of the sauce so that it doesn’t splatter out. I have a few battle scars on my arms from when I wasn’t careful.
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- Silicone bags
The best part is that this homemade pasta sauce freezes well so you can eat a taste of summer all year long. I’ve tried canning before, but it is time consuming and you have to add lemon juice to lower the acid to prevent spoilage. That means that the flavor of your sauce will not be as sweet. Instead, I prefer to freeze my sauce, and the best way is to portion out into quart sized bags (3-4 cups) and get out as much air as possible. I prefer these silicone sealer bags. The slide allows you to “burp” the bag to let out the extra air to get a good seal. I’ve also found that the food lasts longer in the freezer with less chance of freezer burn. The bags are reusable and you don’t have to think about buying plastic bags ever again. Washing with vinegar and baking soda will remove any stains left by the tomato sauce.
Homemade Pasta Sauce
Ingredients
- 5 pounds of fresh tomatoes seeded and roughly chopped
- 1/4 cup olive oil
- 3 medium onions diced
- 8 cloves of fresh garlic minced
- 1/3 cup fresh basil leaves finely chopped
- 1 sprig of fresh thyme leaves or 1/2 tsp dried
- 1 sprig of fresh oregano or 1 teaspoon dried oregano
- 2 bay leaves
- 2 sprigs of parsley or 1 tsp dried
- 1 teaspoon sea salt
- 1 carrot
Instructions
- Chop all your vegetables before you start cooking. Dice the onions, mince the garlic, and chop the basil. Cut the tomatoes in half, remove most of the seeds and juice, and then roughly chop. It is important to remove the seeds and liquid or the sauce will not thicken properly. Cut the carrot in half and put one of the halves to the side. The other half should be grated.
- Heat the olive oil in a large stockpot over medium heat until it shimmers.
- Add onions, garlic and grated carrots and saute for 5-6 minutes until the onions are translucent.
- Add tomatoes, basil, oregano, thyme, bay leaves, parsley and sea salt to the stock pot.
- Simmer on low heat for at least 2 hours or until cooked down and starting to darken.
- Add carrot piece for the last 30 minutes to absorb acidity.
- Remove the carrot, bay leaves, and thyme, parsley, and oregano stems (the leaves will have fallen off the stems into the sauce).
- Turn off the heat and use an immersion blender to puree sauce until smooth. Alternatively, let the mixture cool and puree in a batches in a blender.
- Use immediately or freeze in quart sized zipper bags. If air tight, the sauce will keep for 6-12 months.
Notes
