Recipe: Perfect Red Sauce

The tomato may just be my favorite single ingredient. It forms the base of some of my favorite dishes, from salsa and indian curries to maybe it's proudest form - Italian red sauces. About a year ago I developed an obsession with creating the perfect red sauce that culminated in creating batches nearly 3 times a week until I finally felt that I couldn't improve upon it any further. Although better sauces are very much possible if you possess an abundance of fresh seasonal ingredients, money to blow, and time to kill, this sauce is tuned to be affordable, quick, and reproducible any time of year. This is an always satisfying go-to sauce.

The Ingredients

A great red sauce should have very few ingredients, the magic is creating something wholly different from the component parts. Quality is important, but the recipe is lenient and robust enough to tolerate lapses as every step is built to squeeze the potential out of every ingredient.

Tomato - The heart of the sauce. Use a large can of whole plum tomatoes packed in juice (with or without salt and basil). DO NOT buy seemingly fancy tomatoes imported from Italy, even if they're DOP San Marzano's, they'll suck, since US tariffs only allow importing tomatoes if they're sold as "sauce" instead of "produce", which means they have to pack them in puree instead of juice. Save money and quality by purchasing a US tomato packed in juice with calcium chloride (it preserves the flavor of the tomato despite the harsh canning process). My favorites are Muir Glen Organic Plum, Hunt's if I can't find that, and Trader Joe's if I'm going for maximum cheapness.

Carrot - The carrot is here for texture and sweetness to balance the acidity of the tomato. Use one large or two small, the sweeter the better. No need to peel.

Onion - I usually use a medium-large Spanish Yellow, but you can use red or white if you like, just avoid the sweet variety.

Garlic - Use a few cloves to half a head depending on your preference. I love garlic, and always use an unreasonable amount, much to my delight.

Thyme, Basil, Chili Flakes - Dried or fresh both work great for this, use double if fresh. Remember that even dried herbs loose flavor, toss them if 6+ months old and/or not airtight.

(you'll also want plenty of red wine on hand for drinking and splashing into the sauce)

Mise En Place

I highly recommend doing all the slicing, dicing, grating and smooshing before you turn on the stove since some of the prep is a bit labor intensive and the actual cooking process benefits so much from proper timing.

Tomato - Grab a good sized serving bowl and mush the tomatoes apart into puree with your hands (I like this part), and leave the juice in the can for use later.

Carrot - Since our goal with the carrot is to add sweetness and body to the sauce, it's best to get it shredded as fine as possible to bring out all those sweet juices. I use a microplane grater for this step and it works wonders, especially when it's resting on top of the bowl for leverage. The carrot gets reduced to a fluffy, stringy, and very sweet pulp. You could use a regular box grater if you don't have a microplane, but I really recommend picking one up, it's great for cheese and zesting and really easy to clean. Just don't grate your knuckles off!

Onion - Dice up fairly fine, a quarter inch is perfect.

Garlic - I use the much defamed garlic press, it seems to juice the garlic and get the flavor distributed more evenly, but use whatever you like, you'll just want to cook the garlic longer if you chop it.

Cooking

1. Sweat the onions and chili flakes in too much olive oil (pour oil into pan until it looks like a little too much, then pour about 50% more). A teaspoon of chili flakes will give a subtle kick, use way more if you like it hot. Add a pinch or two of salt. Cook the onions low and slow, the goal in this step is to create onion and chili flavored olive oil, not to caramelize or brown anything. You want to hear just a very quiet sizzle and smell the aroma of the olive oil. It's ready for the next step when the onions soften and the oil tastes strongly of spicy onion and chile.

2. Add the carrot, thyme, and garlic to our spicy oil base by starting first with the carrot (unless you chopped the garlic, add it with the carrot if so) and turn the heat up just a touch, we want just a little sizzle here. Add the thyme shortly after the carrot and stir to keep anything from getting too scalded, we're still just trying to flavor the olive oil and create the textured base for the sauce without changing the flavors of the individual ingredients too much. Once the carrot starts getting a bit pale and the oil tastes a bit sweet, add the garlic. Move immediately to step 3 once the garlic gets past the "burning your eyes" stage but still smells very aromatic.

3. Splash a few ounces of red wine into the sauce to sop everything up into a cohesive whole before we add the tomato. Turn the heat up to medium to get the wine to reduce down a bit, you want to see a bit of steam. Once the wine smells concentrated (about 2min) add the crushed tomatoes a handful at a time trying to avoid adding too much liquid all at once. Stir often and crush any large remaining tomato chunks with your spoon. Move to step 4 after letting this mixture bubble for a couple minutes.

4. Add reserved tomato liquid and basil to the sauce to add a hit of freshness. Add salt to taste, less if you used salted tomatoes of course. That's about it! At this point you just let the sauce cook enough to reduce a bit but not bubble all over your kitchen. The longer you can let it do this the better, the flavors concentrate, but a similar thing seems to happen when you leave the leftovers in the fridge, so don't be afraid to eat now and let the leftovers get better.

Comments

[andy]

Tim-
Andy here checkin out this site. Todd said you were obsessed with the red sauce.
Got to try this! I've never used carrots before.
Andy

[camille]

thankz for posting this,it helps me a lot in my project. camx