A SIMPLE DISH, INTENSIFIED
Fresh Tomato Pasta Sauce
Absolutely Not Like Mom Used to Make
One of my favorite songs is Bob Dylan’s “Brownsville Girl¹,” from his 1986 album Knocked Out Loaded. It’s full of amazing imagery. It is very long, over 11 minutes, but I can listen to it over and over. I just don’t get tired of that song. It seems like every time I hear it, something new reveals itself. My favorite passage is:
You always said people don’t do what they believe in,
they just do what’s most convenient, then they repent
When I was a kid, spaghetti was an easy go-to when Mom was not motivated to make dinner. Her version of spaghetti dinner was bloated overcooked spaghetti with a jar of leading-brand prepared pasta sauce unceremoniously dumped over it. It was pretty horridious. I’d like to say she did her best, but that wasn’t really the case. She did what was easiest. Too many kids grow up thinking that the way their parents do things is just the way it is. The truth of it is, my parents were narcissists. They had kids because it was expected, then resented their children for ruining their lives.
The result is that the bloody-rare chicken, the tough-as-shoe-leather pork chops, the dried out fish sticks, the canned vegetables boiled to mush, and all the other culinary horrors that my Boomer parents rained down on us daily was not necessity, but a combination of parental self-loathing and narcissistic passive aggression. I mean, us rotten kids ruined their lives, so we needed to be punished for that, right?
Fast-forward a bunch of years, and I found myself married to an Italian who had been raised in a household where they knew how to cook properly. Those national name brand pasta sauces were just not gonna cut it anymore. Not that they ever did. The next time you are in a grocery store, read the back of a jar of mass market pasta sauce. Brand doesn’t matter; they are all equally gross.
When I first started making pasta sauce at home, I used canned tomato sauce, canned chopped tomatoes, canned paste, fresh garlic sautéed in olive oil, and some dried oregano and basil, with sometimes a little black pepper thrown in. A chopped up stick of pepperoni goes well in there too, if you want a meat sauce. Add a little red wine to that, slow cook it for a few hours, and you are good to go.
My wife has a life-long allergy to peppers. For this reason, we tend to avoid eating at restaurants. We have found that with the recent obsession with peppers in all forms of cooking, combined with the fact that far too many restaurants do not take food allergies seriously, it is just too risky to eat out. We used to love eating out when we were younger, but we have had far too many instances of pepper poisoning, and will just not take that chance anymore. The other thing is, as I have gotten better at cooking, we have realized most restaurants are really not all that good anyway, and certainly not for the prices they charge.
A strange trend has started over the last few years where even things that traditionally did not contain peppers have started to have peppers showing up in their formulations. A popular brand of prepared soup bowl that my wife used to buy poisoned her at work with peppers added to, and I kid you not, miso soup. That brand of miso soup had always been safe for her to eat, and at some point, she got really sick after eating some of it. I looked at the back of the box, and sure enough, they had started adding hot peppers to a product that had never contained peppers before, and they had not even placed any text on the package to indicate that the formulation had changed.
Similarly, I had to stop using canned tomato sauce. For some reason, most of the major brands of canned tomato sauce now include red peppers. I cannot imagine why anyone thought it would be a good idea to add red peppers to a product labeled “tomato sauce,” but there it is. One more product I can’t use.
This really has not meant the end of making pasta sauce at home. It just meant I had to get smarter. There is a brand of packaged tomato product imported from Italy that contains just that: Tomatoes. That is quite literally the only ingredient. I use that frequently. More often, I just start my pasta sauces with fresh Roma tomatoes.
The nice thing about starting a red sauce with fresh tomatoes is that there is no need to cook the sauce for hours to get rid of the acidity that comes with prepared tomato concentrates. This lets you put your sauce together, cook down the tomatoes, and the sauce is ready to eat in much less time.
When I use fresh tomatoes, I start by parboiling the tomatoes. This is easy. You will want to put a cut in one end of each tomato. I just use a sharp knife to cut a small “x” into the end of the tomato opposite the stem end. Once you have prepared all the tomatoes this way, drop them into a pot of boiling water. You will not need to leave them in for more than a minute. The point is not to cook the tomatoes, but just to loosen the skin. After about a minute, remove the tomatoes from the boiling water and immerse them in cold water. This will cool them quickly, so they stop cooking.
Once the tomatoes have cooled enough to touch, remove them from the cold bath and skin them. The skin should just slide off after parboiling. Cut the stem end off the tomato and quarter what is left, lengthwise. If you do not like the tomato seeds, this is also when you will want to cut out the core. For pasta sauce, I usually remove the core. Cut the long quarters in half crosswise to make the pieces bite-sized.
In a hot skillet, place some light olive oil and minced fresh garlic. You will probably need no more than a couple tablespoons of olive oil. Really, you just need to sauté the garlic until it is soft. Raw garlic can have a really unpleasant bite. Cooking takes the edge off that bite. How long you sauté the garlic is a matter of taste. If you sauté the garlic until it is brown, it will impart a nice toasty flavor to the dish. Watch it carefully if you do this. It only takes seconds for the garlic to go from brown to black, and then it is burnt and unusable. If you burn the garlic, you will just want to start over, as it will make your whole sauce taste burnt.
When you are happy with the state of the garlic, place your tomatoes into the skillet. The cold tomatoes will cool the oil and stop the garlic from cooking further. At this point, add whatever other spices you want. I usually add some basil and oregano. The amount is up to you based on personal taste. When cooking for two, I usually start with a dozen or so Roma tomatoes. To that I add probably a couple tablespoons of basil and maybe a couple teaspoons of oregano. Basil has a nice sweet taste. It is possible to overdo it on the basil, but too much basil will not necessarily ruin the dish. Oregano has a more pungent, earthy taste, and can overpower the dish if not used sparingly.
I frequently add some salt and black pepper to the sauce at this point as well, to bring out all the flavors. If you want a spicier sauce, add more black pepper; less will make the flavor brighter without so much heat. Once the spices are in, I just let the sauce simmer for a while, maybe 10–15 minutes. When you want to eat, prepare your favorite pasta as directed on the package and serve on a plate or bowl with a couple of serving spoons’ worth of sauce over the top. My favorites are rigatoni, penne, rotini and angel hair, not necessarily in that order. Finish it off with a bit of freshly grated Parmesan or Romano cheese, and enjoy.
Bear in mind too, most of the fun of cooking is in experimentation. It is deliberate that I did not include measurements except in very broad terms. Play around with it and find out what you like. Maybe you decide you’d like your sauce better with some onions or sausage added. You might try adding some diced pepperoni. If you find the acidity a bit much, try adding a little red wine to the pan when cooking the sauce. Heck, add peppers if you want. I don’t eat peppers because I don’t want to poison my wife, but unless you share that allergy, there’s no reason not to. Oh, and don’t add sugar to your sauce. My Italian wife has assured me, that is not ok.
Once you have made a few batches of pasta sauce, you will start to develop a feel for the proportions that will give you the taste you are looking for. Years ago, someone asked me for my pasta sauce recipe. I laughed at first, then went home and racked my brain to cobble together some approximation of a recipe. I never use printed recipes for tomato sauce. I just kind of add stuff until it looks and tastes right, and take it from there. That’s what makes cooking so fun, there is no need to follow someone else’s recipe. Find out what works for you and run with it. Even if you completely mess it up, where else in life can you just eat your mistakes?
