Jan 31, 2021

Sunday Marinara

Ingredients

  • 56oz San Marzano tomatoes with liquid (2 28oz cans)
  • 2C water
  • 0.25C olive oil
  • 2 medium onions
  • 2 medium carrots
  • 3 large ribs of celery
  • 1 lemon, juiced
  • 6-8 large cloves of garlic, pressed
  • 2T double concentrated tomato paste
  • 2T chopped “Italian” flat-leaf parsley
  • 0.5T “Italian” herbs (dried or fresh)
  • 1t anchovy paste
  • 0.5t kosher salt
  • 0.5t crushed red pepper
  • 0.5t dried oregano
  • 0.5t cracked black pepper

Process

Grate onions, carrots, and celery. Bring olive oil to medium-low heat in a large saucepan. Add red and black pepper, oregano, and anchovy paste. Cook, stirring periodically, until fragrant or for about 1 minute. Add tomato paste and crushed garlic. Stir into oil and allow to cook for at least 2-3 minutes, until fragrant. Add grated vegetables and salt and cook over medium low heat, stirring periodically, for at least 20 minutes, until smell/flavor is nutty and a fond has begun to form.

Meanwhile, using clean hands crush tomatoes in their juices. Deglaze pan with lemon juice and add crushed tomatoes, parsley, and Italian herbs. Add water to the cans and/or other vessels the tomatoes were in and add this water. Partially cover and bring to a gentle simmer. Reduce to low heat and allow to simmer for at least 2 hours, or until desired flavor/consistency is reached.

Notes

My take on Italian-American “marinara” sauce. Works great as a base sauce for other dinners throughout the week. Add a bit of sugar for a pizza sauce. Add seared Italian sausage and simmer for another couple of hours for Italian sausage spaghetti sauce. I find that grating the vegetables, while laborious, produces a final product where the “chunkiness” of the sauce comes from rich tomatoes, not pieces of spent onion and celery whose flavors have been well extracted over a period of hours.

If you want to add fresh basil to the sauce (in addition to any that might be included in your “Italian herbs”), I recommend adding it around ten minutes before the end of the simmering process, or even just when reheating.

It’s certainly possible to substitute a bit of white wine (around 0.25C) or even a thematic vinegar (such as white wine vinegar or white balsamic vinegar) for the lemon juice, but I find the lemon juice adds a nice brightness to the dish. It’s also possible to leave out the anchovy paste (if you don’t eat fish or you find anchovies disgusting); if I were going to do so I would add another 0.25t of salt to balance out the saltiness. I will say, if you aren’t opposed to eating fish for dietary reasons, the anchovies do add a very nice blast of umami and do not taste anything like anchovies/fish in the final product.

On the topic of salt, I tend to under season sauces/soups so they can be paired with other salty ingredients without producing a meal that is ridiculously salty. For instance, the quantities in this recipe produce about 14 0.5C servings. When using my preferred brand of San Marzano tomatoes, tomato paste, and anchovy paste (which is Cento in all three cases), each portion which contains around 65 calories, 3.9g of fat (0.5g saturated fat), and about 125mg of sodium (or about 5% fat, 2.5% saturated fat, and 5.5%, for those who think in terms of FDA percent daily values). In terms of calories and fat, these numbers are comparable to most store-bought “marinara,” but this is considerably less salt than I have typically found (around 3-4 times less).

I think there are a variety of reasons why store bought sauces contain more salt (for instance, shelf stability, or the fact that salty food tastes good), but when I’m constructing a meal that I want to leave me feeling satiated but not “salted out,” I tend to look at the big picture. This means I would rather add a bit of extra salt to a sauce like this if I’m just serving it with vegetables over spaghetti than have my meatball sub contain more sodium than I’m supposed to consume in an entire day.

Part of the appeal of making a sauce like this from scratch in the first place is greater control, so obviously if you would rather have a saltier sauce then by all means, go for it.

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