Every high school student should learn how to make a marinara sauce. It’s totally easy. It tastes a million times better than any jarred sauce. The ingredients are all in the pantry. It’s the best way to make a cheap meal. And once you’ve mastered a marinara, you can use it as the basis for another hundred dishes.
The Times has an article on marinara sauce with tips from Lidia Bastianich, my all-time favorite Italian cookbook writer. Chop your garlic, rather that using a garlic mashing tool. Use good olive oil and good canned tomatoes. Use a flat pan, not a sauce pan. Use fresh basil. Don’t let it cook all day, just 25 minutes. I always make mine with half an onion, too.
Once you’ve got this sauce down pat, you can play with it. Variations — Eggplant and capers, pesto and ground beef, chicken and rosemary, zucchini and sausage, tuna and olives.
And then you have to deal with pasta the right way. Cook the pasta in salted water (no oil). Drain it quickly so that there is still some water on the pasta. Never rinse the pasta. Throw the pasta immediately into the sauce and let it hang out there for a minute. You want the pasta to take in all that flavor. Never put a lid on the cooked pasta.
Apt. 11d 
Rinsing pasta is a bigger Protestant tell than arguing whatever it is they argue about works vs. faith.
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Oh! Oh! Do you have a good link for a clear explanation of the theological debate between works and faith? I’ve tried to explain it to the kids, but any web searches have turned up current-day preachers damning the other side of the debate.
(Protestant, but too lazy to rinse.)
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Really. I thought it was largely worked out. I can’t remember the differences in detail.
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Our Georgian (Apostolic and Autocephalous) Orthodox nanny also rinsed. Not sure whether it was theology or legacy of a previous ideology, however.
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Pasta sauce seems like something that is good enough jarred that it’s rarely worth it to make it from scratch. Fresh does taste better but not so much better that it’s worth the extra work. How does pasta sauce freeze?
I guess making a huge batch and freezing it in portion sizes might make the fresh sauce worth it.
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I miss home economics classes (though maybe now they could just be cooking/cleaning classes, with a bit of mending thrown in).
It took me a long time to start liking Italian food, ’cause the only Italian food I knew was the heavy jarred sauces, some with meat, or the melty cheese/heavy cream sauces. It was a delight to discover the lighter food (when introduced to it by my Italian friends).
I think the marinara sauce, cooked for 25 minutes, is a completely different entity than the jarred sauces. Also, the coating the pasta with the sauce (rather than putting the past into a really thick soup). I’m still not a big pasta fan (still like breads and rices better as my starch), but the good stuff is better than the stuff I knew from the past.
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rather than putting the past into a really thick soup
The past is another entree.
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“The past is another entree.”
O, MH, I wish we had “likes” on this blog.
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Yes, we need a like button on this blog. Or maybe an inside joke emoticon that only regular readers will get.
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I can’t TELL you how many times I’ve tried to “like” a comment! #mixingupplatforms
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Thanks, but bad puns are their own reward.
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PS: Is J learning to make his own sauce? I’ve always thought that the teen years when the boys are hungry (and the girls are picky, and thinking about healthy food) would be a good time to get teach to make what they want to eat. I know a number of adult men who seem to have learned to cook that way, at the point when they were hungry and needed to feed themselves, and then, as they grew older, their repertoire branched out.
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This is one of my favorite homemade (kind of, it does have canned tomatoes) tomato sauces but it takes too long for a weekday meal. I’m not willing to spend more than half an hour on a meal on a weekday so a jarred sauce is usually what I use. It seems like jarred sauces have improved substantially over the last five to ten yeas and there are now some very decent ones out there that rival fresh.
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http://www.derekoncastiron.com/2010/10/recipe-outstanding-marinara-sauce.html
Another quick recipe. I use a hand-blender attachment to chop my garlic.
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Cooks Illustrated says reserve a few of the canned tomatoes from the simmer, and add them at the very end with the pasta.
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Interesting. It turns out that I haven’t ever actually made marinara (I use onions and red wine, and cook for longer), so I’ll have to try this.
Tomato sauce (my type, anyway) freezes very well. I get tons of tomatoes from my CSA in August and make big batches. Just the other day I roasted some red peppers and mixed them with roasted sungolds from the freezer to make a sauce, and it was amazing.
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