Recipe Review: The best tomato sauce ever (apparently)

Beginning in the last several months, I started to be bombarded by many of the social media outlets that I follow about Marcella Hazan's tomato sauce. Apparently, the recipe is from one of her cookbooks in the 70s and has found a renewed following. The recipe is simplistically easy - obviously made for someone like me.


I first made is about 1.5 months ago and put it in a new eggplant parm recipe that I found. Which is another story (as it happened to be one of the best meals I've ever made).


I made it again last week, with our own homegrown tomatoes and it turned out equally awesome! Here's the low down:

The onions, butter
 and tomato simmering.

Start with 2 pounds of tomatoes. I used fresh tomatoes and thus boiled them for two minutes, peeled them and sliced them. You could also start with canned tomatoes (I'd say crushed would probably work best) or try various other methods to peel them. Put the tomatoes, one medium onion peeled and halved, 5tbs. of butter (unsalted) and then just some salt to taste in your sauce pot. Simmer on low for at least 45 minutes. 


And there you have it, the best tomato sauce ever. HOWEVER - this is truly just tomato sauce, this is not the marinara that your mother used to pour out of a Prego jar and dump half a bottle of wine in, while finishing the other half (or did only my mom do that?). The sauce is melding of sweetness, acidity and pure essence of tomato.

From L to R: Oregano, Basil and Parsley.
Also the onions waiting for Paolo/the
dog to consume them. 

At any rate, I added a few other things: oregano, basil, parsley (all out of our garden as well), black pepper, garlic and wine (obvs). The amounts are not really important, it all depends on how you like your sauce to taste. We like a lot of garlic, a little wine and a lot of basil. 


The only thing with doing your own tomatoes as opposed to buying the canned, is how long it has to simmer and the chunkiness of the sauce. I did not run it through our food mill, so it was chunky and had I cooked it down to the consistency I prefer, it would have taken two hours to simmer. However we were starving, so we just ate it thin and chunky, served over wheat spaghetti.

And I shall leave you with this:

While we cook Paolo and I get in each others way, which results in a lot of arguing. Which consequently involves a lot of gesticulation, which is how this happened.