Well, my original plan for this WFD diary was to write (a bit late) about Lunar New Year and the associated Vietnamese foods. My BF is Vietnamese-American, and his family's Tet party is a very big deal that I try to make every year. I had this great plan to turn the experience into a WFD diary. But then, we missed the party (and most of the food), so my whole plan went out the window. Also, thenekkidtruth ended up writing a wonderful Lunar New Year diary for this year. So I decided to come up with a different idea.
Tonight, I'm treading into some dangerous waters. Let's talk tomato sauce. I've found out the hard way that people can be very serious and protective when it comes to their family's sauce. All other sauce is garbage at best, blasphemy at worst. I can understand why. A really, really good tomato sauce is worth throwing fists up for.
I'm not Italian-American, and my family does not have a prized tomato sauce recipe I'm willing to fight to the death over. We ate out of many a jar of Prego. We did have a (rather strange at first glance) spaghetti sauce recipe, though, known simply as "Martin's sauce." Martin was my aunt's boyfriend for a time, and while he didn't stick around for long, he did bequeath to us his sauce recipe:
1 medium onion, finely chopped
1 large bell pepper, chopped
2 cups mushrooms, chopped
6 cloves garlic, minced
1 Tbsp olive oil
1 lb lean ground beef
30 oz tomato sauce
14 1/2 oz diced tomatoes
12 oz tomato paste
2 tsp sugar
Worcestershire sauce to taste
A1 Steak Sauce to taste
Louisiana Hot Sauce to taste
Salt and black pepper to taste
1. Add olive oil to a large pot. Sauté the onion until it starts to get tender.
2. Add the garlic, bell pepper, and mushrooms. Continue to cook until the bell pepper starts to get tender.
3. Add the ground beef, generously seasoning with salt and black pepper. Add Worcestershire sauce, A1 Steak Sauce, and Louisiana Hot Sauce. Cook through.
4. Add tomato sauce, diced tomatoes, and tomato paste, along with Worcestershire sauce, A1 Steak Sauce, Louisiana Hot Sauce, and sugar to taste. Stir and heat through.
I know, enough to make your grandmother, who crushed tomatoes with her bare hands, roll over in her grave. It makes no claim to be an authentic Italian sauce. And it's a tasty spaghetti sauce, believe it or not (and you probably don't), but I wouldn't expect it to win any prizes. That Louisiana Hot Sauce isn't too good for one's acid reflux, either.
Martin's sauce is good when I'm feeling nostalgic and a little trashy. But when I want to make a really nice basic tomato sauce, I can't do much better than this one from Food Wishes. I've tried several different basic sauce recipes, and this one is the one I keep going back to. I normally tweak recipes until they're unrecognizable, but with this I've stayed pretty true to the original, only adding basil at the end (because I need my basil). It's just that good.
The most important part of tomato sauce, of course, is the tomato. If you're going to put the time and effort into making sauce from scratch instead of opening a jar, you'd might as well invest in the best canned tomatoes you can find. If you can, San Marzano tomatoes are best. They're long, tender, and packed with basil leaves. They're quite a bit better than your standard plum tomato, which tends to be tougher and have a more acidic flavor profile. And with San Marzano tomatoes, you'll be able to easily crush them by hand (just like your grandmother did), as they just fall apart when you pick them up. I like to crush mine until they're somewhat pureed but still slightly chunky. If I can't find San Marzano tomatoes, I usually substitute a good can of Cento or Muir Glen plum tomatoes.
Here are the rest of the ingredients:
56 oz whole San Marzano tomatoes, crushed
1/4 cup olive oil
1 small onion, finely diced
1 rib celery, finely diced
4 cloves garlic, finely minced
1 tsp salt
2 tsp sugar
1/2 tsp dried Italian herbs
Pinch of red pepper flakes
1 tsp anchovy paste
1 tsp white wine vinegar
1 Tbsp tomato paste
2 Tbsp Italian parsley, finely chopped
Fresh basil, chopped
Water as needed
Start by sweating the onion and celery in the olive oil for about 15 minutes, or until they're very soft. Add the garlic, salt, sugar, dried Italian herbs, and red pepper flakes, stir, and cook until the garlic is fragrant. Then, add the anchovy paste (yes, really) and white wine vinegar and wait until the liquid cooks off. Stir in the tomato paste. Then, just add the tomatoes, parsley, and a splash of water. Stir to combine and simmer for an hour and a half, stirring occasionally. When it's done, it should be nice and thick, and the flavor should be spot on. But if you find it needs a little something else, a splash of fish sauce never killed anybody. Just add the basil and it's done.
I'm enjoying this with some bucatini and parmesan/romano. Life doesn't get too much better than this. It's the simple things. Just add wine.
So that's my go-to basic tomato sauce recipe, and until I find a better one, I'm sticking to it. But tomato sauce is a very personal thing, so I'm interested to hear about
your favorite sauce recipe, if you have one. In the meantime, what's for dinner at your place tonight?