Why make your own marinara sauce when there are so many for sale? To enjoy the best marinara sauce, build, don’t buy it, because the best marinara sauce is worth the 15-20 minutes it takes to create the most delicious marinara you will encounter in your lifetime. In our house, our homemade marinara sauce carries a deep, distinctive flavor that is asked for by children and adults alike. It is elemental in pizza, as an addition to soups such as minestrone and I throw marinara into some recipes when they ask for tomato paste or tomatoes, just to deepen the flavor.
This is a recipe from Naples, an old city in Southern Italy known for its inexpensive lifestyle. For about $6 worth of canned plum tomatoes, tomato paste and pasta you can feed 6 hungry people and blow them away in the process. The secret in the sauce is the wilting of the onion and browning of the garlic in the olive oil, then removing them, which infuses the garlic and onion into the tomato mixture. This is deep! This is also a great way of using up all of those tomatoes in the garden. I hope you’ll love this recipe as much as we do.
Use one whole can of Italian plum tomatoes and a 6 oz. can of tomato paste. I used Blanco Dinapoli for my tomatoes and Muir Glen for my paste.
Pour a 1/2 cup of extra virgin olive oil into the bottom of a medium-sized saucepan. Add a whole, quartered onion and saute until wilted.
This was starting to get brown, but you can see the wilting…
Remove the onion from the oil, retaining as much of the oil (returning it to the pan) as you can. Smash several garlic cloves and add to the hot oil. and remove when brown.
Add a 28 oz can of whole plum tomatoes to the pan. It will sizzle, so stand back!
Squish the still-cool tomatoes between your fingers to get nice, uneven-sized chunks of tomato in your sauce. Carravaggio style!
If you are fussy, you can cut them into even pieces.
Add the tomato pastes, a 1/2 cup of water, a 1/2 tsp of sugar and salt and pepper to taste. That is a basil leaf on the left in the picture, which came in my can of tomatoes. A little friend. And there you have it, the best marinara sauce ever.
Add a 1/2 cup of fresh or frozen peas–yes, peas! They add a nice foil of sweetness against the tang of the tomatoes.
From here you can add all sorts of other vegetables and cooked meats to make it your sauce.
Best Marinara Sauce
one 28-oz can of whole tomatoes or use fresh with skin removed (do not used crushed or diced tomatoes)
one, 6-oz can of tomato paste
1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil
1 medium onion quartered
3 cloves garlic, smashed
1/2 cup peas (optional)
1/2 cup water
1/2 tsp sugar
Salt and pepper to taste
If you are going to serve a meal with pasta with this, put on your water to boil for pasta. The sauce takes as long to make as the pasta takes to cook.
In a medium-sized saucepan, pour in the olive oil and add the onion and cook until wilted, about 10 minutes. Remove the onions from the oil using a slotted spoon. Return any oil to the pan. Add the garlic to the pan and cook until browned, about 2 minutes. Remove the garlic from the oil. Pour in the tomatoes, but be careful to stand back so that you are not splattered with hot oil. Immediately squish the tomatoes between your fingers to break them up. If you want them to look perfect, cut them in dice before addidng to the pan. Cook for 10 minutes. Add the tomato paste, water, peas, sugar and season with salt and pepper. Cook for another 10 minutes.
Note: The onions that you wilted taste great with a touch of salt to eat as you stand and cook.
Enjoy!
Thanks for reading!
Cooky
I added a 1/2 lb of cooked Italian sausage from Whole Foods to my marinara and served it over Kirkland 5 Cheese Tortellini, from Costco. Yummy.
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