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Coincidentally, I had read this thread yesterday and re-read Antonius' recipe for Ragu alla Bolognese and there was Lydia Bastianich cooking up her Tuscan Meat and Tomato ragu on tv last night. I felt compelled to watch her as I remembered her method being similar to the more traditional recipes I've seen -- and the end result looked fabulous. However there are a few differences in Lydia's method: She uses porcini and their soaking liquid, tossing in the hydrated mushrooms after sauteeing the battuta. She also uses wine (as do I) and cooks the meat on a high heat (as I do not -- I prefer the softer texture that comes from the low heat approach). She does not skim the sauce. She serves it with tagliatelle, or in fact something a little bit wider than tagliatelle as she used her own homemade pasta and cut it to her taste. But the key, and this has been said before many times, was that she very lightly dressed the pasta with the sauce. As she shoveled the first bite into her mouth I realized I was salivating like a wildebeest and had it not been 8 at night and 95 muggy degrees I would have been sorely tempted to begin the 5 hour journey myself.

Trying to perfect the kind of pasta sauce I want to take a bath in because it tastes so damn good. I am very tired of the jarred crap I have been buying lately and I want to try to make a good homemade marinara. I followed this recipe from Lidia's Italy (http://www.lidiasitaly.com/recipes/detail/589) for a first time try. I used some canned tomatoes (The brand was Dei Fratelli, not my choice but it is what my husband picked up at Jewel) and some fresh organic basil and while decent, it sure didn't give me a wow factor. It was not bland or anything, just not something I am in a hurry to repeat. Mind you, this sauce still turned out better than some of the crap I have bought lately at Aldi's. I think it is something I can work with, but I need more depths in flavor and I am not sure how to proceed with doing so. Also, my minor complaint about the sauce was that it was a bit too sweet. I am not crazy about my pasta sauce being sweet and neither is my husband.

I was thinking that maybe the problem was the brand of tomatoes that I used. I often shop at Caputo's and they have a lot of different brands of canned tomatoes, all Italian names. Can anyone recommend a particular brand that may fare better than Dei Fratelli? Is there a difference in texture between using crushed and whole tomatoes?

I've noticed the San Marzanos at Caputo tend to vary. Strianese, La Valle, Italbrand, or Pastene are ones I look for. Always whole peeled, and DOP.
Jeff

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Also, I prefer to cook the sauce only 20 min or so. I'm burnt on the ultra cooked down 6 hour gravy right now.

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I guess not authentically Italian, but I find Muir Glen tomatoes make the best sauce. I'm also pretty happy with the Pomi brand that comes in the aseptic box.

For the old fashioned red sauces that are cooked longer: There is no place for olives, cumin, honey, vinegar, etc. The old neighborhood italians would make red sauce with neckbones as the base. They used canned or crushed san marzano type tomatoes and some paste. Onions and garlic and olive oil, oregano and maybe basil and salt and pepper. I have never tried the neckbone stuff. I make mine with hamburger. Cooking in a crock pot makes a very rich sauce. If you put cinnamon in it you are greek, not italian.

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Toria

"I like this place and willingly could waste my time in it" - As You Like It,
W. Shakespeare

One of my favorite pasta sauces is also one of the easiest, a basic puttanesca. Start by simmering a tin's worth of anchovies and a few minced garlic cloves in a little oil then add crushed tomatoes (I prefer Muir Glen Fire Roasted) and pitted kalamata olives and capers. I usually simmer it for about an hour. I've made more complex and long-cooking sauces, but this is the one that gets the most praise from dinner guests.

Absolutely agree with this. Muir Glens are my go-to canned tomatoes for most occasions. (Except for American-style pizza sauces, where I like 6-in-1 brand tomatoes. They'd also be good as a base for Italian-American style pasta sauces.) I prefer them to all the San Marzanos (DOP and non) I've tried so far.

Same here. I used to regularly pay extra for the San M. tomatoes and found they were frequently not that flavorful. I do like the Pomi, and 6-in-1, Muir Glen.

Also find Loreto Caspar and Hazan books very useful (as mentioned up thread). Particularly Hazan in either her first or second book, where she provides 3 tomato sauce bases of increasing intensity, then a whole batch of individual recipes built on each of the 3 base sauces.

It all depends on your taste preferences, but I've always been very partial to
* simple tomato-anchovy sauce
* tom.-rosemary-pancetta sauce
* "Woodsman's style" (tom. with mushroom and ham): this is one in which she finishes the pasta in the sauce pan and you can really taste that difference. She also provides a nice trick whereby you impart a bit of wild mushroom flavor to regular white mushrooms by way of a bit of anchovy and wine reduction.

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"Strange how potent cheap music is."

So many people prefer the Muir Glen, but the two times I had them I found them too acidic. I should give them another try.

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When pressed for time--as I am normally--I try to get as good a sauce & pasta as I can out within an hour, start to finish. And when I don't have tomatoes from the garden, that means using a jar sauce to finish it off. There's only one kind I will use, and that's about the cheapest, believe it or not--Rinaldi original, which is a slightly sweet, almost Sicilian style. On sale I've found it at $1.29 a jar, which is a tremendous value. Here's what I do, for my basic puttanesca:

Olive Tap brand porcini olive oil over high heat. Add slivered garlic. Stir, WATCH. When it starts to smoke and turn brown at the edges--so the garlic ends up having that wonderful roasted taste--I quickly add sliced white onion. Turn down heat to medium high, stir. When onions become opaque, add a just a few mushroom pieces, some capers, and Kalamata olives. Stir again, and in 2 minutes add half a box of Pomi crushed tomatoes, and a cup of red wine. Turn back to high heat for evaporation of the wine, and add fresh Italian parsley, basil & cayenne pepper. Add the rest of the Pomi, and the jar of Rinaldi. Mix at medium high heat until bubbling, then turn down to medium and let simmer for 15 minutes.

I have been using the Bella Terra whole wheat angel hair pasta mostly for low-carb purposes, and it's wonderful. 4 minutes to pre-al dente, drain, back in the pot, add a little sauce, mix, then serve with shaved Pecorino Romano cheese.

I do like acidity, and I do agree the Muir Glens tend a bit acidic. Have you ever tried 6-in-1 tomatoes? I don't know if there's different varieties, but the type I always see is the ground tomatoes with extra heavy puree. Reading the label, there are only three ingredients: the ground tomatoes, the heavy puree, and a bit of salt. Nothing else. No citric acid.

The 6-in-1s have a thickish texture to them, because of the extra heavy puree. I'd say it's a viscosity something along the lines of your typical jarred pasta sauce. The tomatoes have great flavor, and, at least to my palate, have very little acidity. Just enough to balance the sweetness of the tomatoes, but not enough to have a noticeable "tang." They might be up your alley.

I always thought they were some generic, bottom-shelf brand of tomatoes (given the name, packaging, and the fact they are inexpensive or often on sale--I just stocked up on 28-oz cans for $1.50 each), until a few years ago I came across a couple pizza recipes on pizzamaking.com that called for 6-in-1 brand crushed tomatoes as a base. So I decided to try them, and I'm glad I did. They're fantastic.

Thanks. I use 6in1 regularly for pizza sauce and sometimes for long cooked
red sauce.

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To answer the main topic, for me, the only secret is good ingredients, tomatoes being the most important for most types of pasta sauce. They don't have to be expensive, imported tomatoes, but find something you like. I will use fresh tomatoes from my garden when they're ripe, but, otherwise, canned tomatoes are usually preferred to fresh tomatoes.

Beyond that, I'm very much a keep-it-simple-stupid type of person when it comes to pasta sauces. (With the exception of Sunday gravy.) A little olive oil (I like Frantoia), some finely minced garlic or onion (I'm not a purist about this, but I generally use one or the other), some diced or crushed tomatoes, and finished off with fresh basil is just about perfect for me on a summer's day. I don't cook it too long--maybe 20 minutes at the most. Just enough to warm it through, but enough to keep the fresh flavor. If I'm feeling a little fancier, I'll throw in some finely chopped pancetta or bacon, and some hot pepper flakes (in the arrabiata direction), and maybe top it with parsley instead of basil. Some anchovies are also a nice addition to a basic tomato sauce. It really doesn't need to be more complicated than this to taste good, but when you're keeping it this simple, the quality of each individual ingredient is magnified.

A long time ago, I used to be of the "throw-everything-in-the-spice-rack-in-the-sauce" type of cook, and then I realized the more spices I added, the worse and worse and muddled the sauce would taste. I shudder at the ingredients that would wind their way into my sauces back then. Stuff like Worcestershire sauce and even curry powder. What was I thinking? To be fair, this was during college, and I was just learning to cook and an eager experimenter. It was only when I stripped it back and started pairing flavors cleanly that I was achieving the results I wanted. Granted, the sauces I prefer do not taste like the typical jarred Italian-American sauces that are heavy on oregano, garlic, and onions, so for someone who is expecting that sort of flavor, the sauces may be considered "bland." I consider them "clean" and "fresh" with the tomatoes shining through.

Now, for Sunday gravy, it's a different story, but my basic tomato sauce is the above.

Pat Bruno recommends 6-in-1 in his book "The Great Chicago-Style Pizza Cookbook" (which is a good book, BTW, despite what you may think of his restaurant review).

I was exactly the same as Binko in college until one of my roommates, of NJ Italian stock, said to me gently, "You know, if you use all the prettiest crayons in the box, you just get brown."
Point taken.
(Thanks, Jimmy.)

Marcella and co. all entered my life a bit later than that.

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"Strange how potent cheap music is."

Pretty much my approach too, although I use both garlic and onion, and sometimes a little tomato paste. I make a couple of quarts and portion it into the quart size ziploc bags and freeze for future use, either as is or as a base for other sauce variations.

I just want to reinforce that this recipe is amazing, and also only has 3 ingredients: tomatoes, butter and an onion (and you don't even have to chop the onion). I think it's a great place for the OP to start.

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You can't unfry things, Jerri.

That's a wonderful quote. I'm going to have to save it.

On the simplicity vein, here's a nice, light sauce that we prefer in warmer weather.

Over medium heat...cover the bottom of a wide pan with a decent olive oil.
Add 6 or so cloves of whole garlic, skin removed.
Chop up one or two tomatoes depending on size and put 1/2 into the oil.
Add about 1/2 - 2/3 cup chicken stock.
Add two whole anchovies or a correlating quantity of anchovy paste.
Let simmer.
Cook a pound of thick spaghetti in salted water.
About a minute before the pasta is al dente, add the rest of the tomatoes to the sauce.
Add the pasta and a tablespoon or so of the pasta water and cook over the heat until about half the sauce has been absorbed. Toss with finely chopped flat leaf parsley. Serve.

This really should not be eaten with cheese (but most people do anyway). We don't eat the cooked cloves but some people do.

I saw that Caputo's had the Strianese but not the others. They also have the Pomi and the 6 in 1 talked about below. I think next time I going to be keen and try one of the three. I think it is all about the quality of the tomatoes I am using. The Dei Fratelli while not bad wasn't really all that great.

Thanks for your help and suggestions, everyone.

Tried the simple sauce of
A can of tomatoes
butter and a halved onion (cooked in the sauce but removed) and it is great!

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Add me to this camp as well. The other night, while pressed for dinner for my 4 year old, my wife and me, I looked around the cupboard for ideas. We didn't have much but we had pasta (a parent's go-to meal), a can of tomato sauce and a can of diced tomatoes. We also had a pound of ground beef.

So, I made simple meat balls - meat, egg, breadcrumbs, Italian seasoning - and fried them in a large sautee pan. Once they were browned on the outside, I drained the fat, added about a 1/3 of onion (chopped) and sauteed in a little oil. Then one clove of crushed garlic (just smashed for easy removal) into the pan for about a minute. Then, the cans of tomatoes, stir, add back the meatballs to cook through and in about 15 minutes, I was eating.

I should note that I didn't have fresh basil so I threw in a pinch of Italian seasoning. I know that someone up-thread mentioned that oregano was a no-no but that's what I had and it turned out fine - pretty good really. Good luck. Lot of good ideas here.

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"It's not that I'm on commission, it's just I've sifted through a lot of stuff and it's not worth filling up on the bland when the extraordinary is within equidistant tasting distance." - David Lebovitz

I tried the 6 In 1 brand of tomatoes and made my own marinara with it for my manicotti. It came out deliciously yummy. Much better than the otehr brand I used.

I'm a fan of the Muir Glen as well. I think roasting/burning the tomatoes adds a really nice flavor, and when I'm using canned I like the Muir Glen for that reason.

For the last few years I've been using Francis Mallmann's burnt tomato recipe for loads of different things. The basic concept is to slice the tomatoes about 1/4" thick, coat one side of them with S+P and EVOO and then toss them on a screaming hot (>800 degrees) griddle until they burn on one side. You don't cook the whole tomato through, just burn one side. They made excellent sauce when you use Roma tomatoes. Just sweat some diced onion, toss in the burnt tomatoes, add some chopped oregano, thyme, and S+P and you're good to go. I let it simmer for 15 minutes at the most.

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