Tomato Sauce
Brian On Thursday, July 22, 2010 at 09:00AM Tomato sauce is a staple ingredient that too many people think comes straight out of a jar. Which is odd, because it's incredibly easy to make, terribly flexible in execution, and just so much better if you do it From Scratch.
How easy is it to make? I was packing for a trip to NYC the next morning, and I needed to do a quick and easy recipe that didn't require any shopping or prep. I took a quick look through the fridge, counter, and pantry, and decided that tomato sauce was the way to go.
This week, I want to try something a bit different. I'm going to give you a recipe for Tomato Sauce at the end of the article. It might not even be my recipe, it could be a link to someone else's. I haven't decided. But I don't want you to use it. Instead, I have a challenge: read this article, twice if you need to, and then make a batch of tomato sauce without referring to this or any other recipe. If you have a few key ingredients, you could do it without shopping, or you may need to grab some things at the store. But I think you can do it without peeking.
To start the sauce, I grabbed a pretty standard assortment of canned tomatoes, celery, carrots, olive oil, wine, and salt. You could use fresh tomatoes for this, especially if you have a bunch lying around from your garden, but for sauce, canned tomatoes are at least as good if not better. I usually save my fresh tomatoes for things that I can't do with canned, such as a BLT variant or a salad or similar. The wine could be stock, or it could be nothing at all, depending on what you have around.
Next, peel or wash your carrots. I prefer peeling, because it seems easier and more thorough to me. Some people prefer washing, I suppose. Doing both is silly, though.
Now we come to the most important part of this process, cutting up your vegetables. If you don't have a lot of experience making small cubes or dices of your carrots, celery, and similar, pay special attention to this bit. It's not difficult, but it is important.
There are three basic steps to cutting vegetables: making them small, making them stable, and making them uniform.
- Small
- Stable
- Uniform
Small. Your knife is only so big, and you can only cut so much at a time. Don't make things awkward for yourself by trying to cut a 1-foot carrot with an 8-inch knife. It's a little bit trickier, and that's when things aren't completely under your control, that's when accidents happen. I will usually find a spot in the carrots where they seem to change diameter the most dramatically, at the transition point between small and large. Some carrots don't have this point, so you can just cut them in half or into 3- or 4-inch segments.
Stable. For carrots, making them stable means cutting them in half, long-wise. This will make two half-moon shapes. Put the flat part against the counter, and then they will not rock back and forth while you cut them.
Small. Next is to get them into the final shape. Since we're going for small cubes, first cut the carrots into strips. If your carrot is large enough that the strips end up rectangular instead of square, then you should cut them into square strips. After that, take a bundle of sticks together and cut across them to create small cubes.
Celery is pretty much the same procedure as carrots. Wash. Cut a manageable length. You don't have to cut in half, because celery has a relatively stable form already. Cut into strips. Cut into cubes.
As I'm making this, I realize that I forgot the onions. This is not tragic; if I didn't have any onions, I would have forged ahead without. But I did have onions, so it was time to add them to the mix.
For cutting onions, split in half in such a way that you cut the root in half; you will cut from the root to the pointy end on the other side. Now it is stable. If there are roots growing out of the onion, trim those so that you still have the dense mass of root inside the onion, but all the curly root bits are trimmed off. That will keep your workspace clean.
Next, peel off the dried skin layers. Then cut off the pointy bit opposite the root. You could cut that off at the beginning, but it makes it a bit easier to peel if you leave it on.
Because everything else is in cubes, you will want to cut the onions from the root end to what was formerly the pointy end, being careful not to actually split the root. This is like making the sticks of carrots and celery. Because the onion has all of the layers, and because you aren't going to want to eat the dense root mass, it's easier to keep it all together. So what you'll have is essentially like a hand, where the root bit is the palm and the slices are the fingers. You want to have each "finger" to be roughly the same thickness as the strips of the carrots and the celery.
Next, slice across the strips in strips the same width as the strips are wide. Now you'll have cubes.
This is a good base of ingredients, but I also remembered that I had some garlic that I picked up at the farmer's market, and while garlic isn't required for tomato sauce, this is great garlic, so it would be a shame to skip it.
Cutting is basically like everything else. Split the cloves in half so they're stable, cut into slices, cut into cubes. You know the drill.
Now for the procedure. Put your sauce pot over medium-low heat and add your oil. Properly, you should put in the carrots, cook for a couple of minutes, then the celery for a couple of minutes, then the onions. Add some salt. Cook all of that together until the onions go from opaque to translucent, then add the garlic and cook for just a couple of minutes. This is known as a "sweat" in English, or the sofrito in Italian. The goal is to soften the aromatic vegetables and release their flavorful juices without browning anything. If you are feeling rushed, naughty, and not Italian, you could add the celery, carrots, and onion all at once and cook until the onions are ready, but you'll have better results doing it the way I listed above, because the carrots take longer to cook than the celery, which takes longer to cook than the onions. Do not skimp on the garlic, because that's very quick to cook, and browned garlic is bitter instead of sweet, and you don't want that.
Once the sofrito is ready, add the rest of the ingredients. Bring to a simmer. Simmer for 45 minutes or until it's thick like a thick tomato sauce. Yes, I have a masterful grasp of the use of similie, thank you for noticing. If it thickens up too much, add some water. If you thin it down too much, just cook it a while longer. Do not add your flavorful liquid (wine, stock, or what have you) to thin the sauce, or you will change the flavor, probably not for the best.
If you have an immersion blender, now's a good time to use it, depending on what you want your sauce to do. As a general rule, I turn mine into something that looks like this:
There you go. Use that on pasta, over fried vegetables, in stews, on pizzas, as a dip, covering lamb, chicken, or beef, or just about anything. I try to make a big batch and freeze most of it in small containers for future use. It is comforting for me to know that I have tomato sauce in the freezer.
If you want to add things to the sauce (olives, mushrooms, meatballs, seafood, etc.), go ahead it cook the addition however much it needs cooking, heat the tomato sauce if necessary, and combine.
Okay, the recipe. Remember, this is not for use. You should try to come grips with the relatively simple procedure and make it without a recipe.
Mario Batali's Basic Tomato Sauce.
Please let us know how the sauce making goes. If I am wrong, I will put in my own basic tomato sauce recipe. If I'm right, I would like to have the warm glow of knowing just how great our readers our.
Share Article 
Reader Comments (6)
I confess that I've never made my own tomato sauce from scratch - the jarred stuff is just so convenient! But I have had my grandmother's homemade sauce and I know it's far superior to the jarred stuff. After reading your post, I've got it in my head that I really need to make some from scratch. Thanks :)
I actually made my own tomato sauce last night for a pizza and didn't even think of putting in carrots and celery. Will have to try that next time. Also, love the Shun knives!
Firstly: thank you for this hugely entertaining blog! I read every article with relish. :-)
Secondly: I learned that it is important for anything you make with tomatoes, to add a little sugar, like a teaspoon full for a whole pot of sauce. It really brings out the flavor of the tomatoes and removes any bitterness they might carry.
tomato sauces and salad dressings are the two things that are so simple and so much better when you make them at home...I just can't buy them premade anymore. I'm working on a pot of sausage ragu as I type this...and it's also easy as pie. I love this challenge and I'm gonna share it in hopes that more people will realize how much better it is when it's whipped together at home!
I have been using tomato sauce from scratch for the past 5 months now. I have bee trying to avoid processed and canned foods as much as possible. I used to follow recipes from the internet. But when you're in a hurry, you end up with what's available at home and you improv or grab whatever will make the sauce delightful.
I use real tomatos. :)
This is really similar to what I do. I haven't used a pre-made pasta sauce in years. However, I MUST have garlic, I often use a diced red pepper, sometimes I add a couple of diced fresh tomatoes along with the canned tomato, and I don't usually blend it. I often add a can of tomato sauce to give it that thicker sauce texture, if I'm in a hurry. Optional items for me include some kind of meat (either small amounts of sauteed bacon or pancetta for flavor, or, for a meat sauce, something ground up); mushrooms; leeks; fresh herbs; a little chicken broth.
If I'm making a pizza, I keep it simple. But I actually really love making tomato sauces, maybe because I'm a huge pasta hound.
Fun post!