How to make tomato sauce

Why less is more here

Tomatoes are high in glutamate and acid and low in almost everything else. Cooked long enough, their water evaporates, their sugars concentrate and caramelise slightly, and the result is deep and savoury on its own.

Adding onion, garlic, herbs, sugar, wine, stock and a handful of dried oregano to a twenty-minute sauce is compensating for a lack of reduction. The additions do not go away; they just sit alongside a thin tomato flavour.

The famous Marcella Hazan sauce — tinned tomatoes, butter, a halved onion, forty-five minutes, onion discarded — makes the point about as clearly as it can be made.

A basic sauce

Twenty minutes of attention, forty of waiting.

1. Use good tinned plum tomatoes, or fresh ones in late summer when they are worth it. Whole tinned tomatoes are usually better than chopped ones, which often contain firmer, lower-grade fruit.
2. Warm olive oil in a wide pan and cook sliced or crushed garlic gently until fragrant but not coloured. Burnt garlic is bitter and cannot be rescued.
3. Add the tomatoes, crushing them with your hands or a spoon. Add a pinch of salt.
4. Simmer, uncovered, over a low heat. Use a wide pan — evaporation is the job.
5. Cook for at least thirty minutes and preferably forty-five to an hour, stirring occasionally, until it has darkened, thickened and the oil begins to separate at the edges.
6. Taste and adjust for salt. Add basil at the very end, torn, off the heat.
7. If it is sharp, a small pinch of sugar helps — though a properly reduced sauce from good tomatoes rarely needs it.

Variations worth knowing

• Marinara — garlic, oil, tomato, oregano. Quick and sharp, cooked for twenty minutes.
• Butter and onion sauce — tomatoes, butter, a halved onion, no garlic. Cooked forty-five minutes and the onion removed.
• Arrabbiata, with dried chilli in the oil at the start.
• Amatriciana, with guanciale rendered first and pecorino at the end.
• Puttanesca, with anchovy, olives, capers and chilli.
• Roasted tomato sauce, where fresh tomatoes are roasted with garlic first and then blitzed. Excellent with mediocre summer tomatoes.
• A soffritto base — onion, carrot and celery cooked slowly first — which makes it sweeter and rounder and is the start of a ragù.

Which tomatoes

Tinned whole plum tomatoes

The reliable year-round choice. Better than chopped, which are often lower grade.

San Marzano

A protected variety, low in seeds and water, sweet. Worth the money if genuine.

Passata

Sieved uncooked tomato. Convenient, smooth, and it reduces faster.

Fresh tomatoes

Only worth it in late summer with ripe fruit. Out of season, tinned is better.

Tomato purée

Concentrated paste. Cook it out for a minute before adding liquid or it tastes raw and metallic.

Common questions