Marinara Sauce

[Jenise]

I used to hate marinara sauce.

Well, maybe 'hate' is too strong a word, but I sure preferred meat sauces and that's because the few marinara sauces I'd had were either bland like barely goosed-up canned tomato sauce or what tasted like a fairly industrial concoction of canned tomatoes and tons of onions. Acrid and underseasoned, to my tastes. It wasn't until I dated a guy from New York who made me his mother's version of 'Sunday gravy' that I got the message: meat not needed if you do it right.

His version started with minced garlic sweated in a generous amount of olive oil. To that, canned tomato sauce was added along with fairly equal parts of dried thyme and basil plus a bay leaf or two. It would simmer for around three hours so that the tomato element had time to acquire that caramelized, long-cooked taste. I fell in love--with the sauce.

And added marinara to my repertoire. To this day I make it the same way, though regardless of my starting tomato base I do embellish mine toward the end of cooking with an extra dose of fresh garlic plus both salt and sugar to pop the flavors. I have a small pot bubbling away on the stove right now made from the five or six getting-spotty store-bought tomatoes I had leftover in the fridge when I got home from the farmer's market yesterday with an excellent fresh local supply (my own plants have yet to give me more than a few, so emergency supplies were needed). It's a lighter sauce than the New Yorker's canned tomato sauce version, but neither's lesser. If we feel like a meat variation, we sometimes prepare a pan-fried Italian sausage patty and serve the sauced pasta over the patty. It's an intriguing layering of flavors that gives your palate more options with every forkfull than you'd have if the meat and sauce were cooked together.

If you make a marinara sauce, how does yours go?

MARINARA SAUCE:

¼ C Olive oil
1 lg Vidalia type onion chopped
1 clove (½ tsp) Garlic minced
1 1lb 12oz can San Marzano Tomatoes
1 6oz can Tomato paste
½ cup Port or other red wine
1 tsp Lawry seasoned salt
1/2 tsp Black pepper
1 tsp Sugar
¼ tsp Granulated garlic (garlic powder)
¼ tsp Ground bay leaf
1 tsp Dried parsley
1/2 tsp Dried (1/2 T fresh) thyme
1 tsp Dried (1 T fresh) basil
1 T Fresh Italian broad leaf parsley chopped

Nuke onion in oil adding garlic for last minute. Crush tomatoes in four quart Dutch oven, and add onions and all other ingredients except fresh parsley. Bring to boil stirring, reduce to simmer, cover, and simmer 30 minutes, stirring regularly. Stir in fresh parsley before serving.

I make mine in the summer when I roast my fresh tomatoes. Tomatoes are roasted with a whole garlic head in the pan, evoo, salt and pepper. Roasted tomatoes get tossed into the food processor along with the squeezed out bulbs of garlic, whizzed, then frozen in 1 cup amounts. When ready to make the marinara, I sauté onions, add the thawed tomato sauce, a good red wine, fresh basil and cook until done. Sometimes my tomato sauce is more like a paste and those are the ones I like to make the marinara sauce with.

Saturday after golf I visited my favorite Amish stand in Peach Bottom PA and bought a 60lb basket of beautiful tomatoes for.....$6. Made sauce into the evening. Froze in 4 cup containers. I simply cut them up with a large vidalia onion, cook them down and simmer for 3 hours, a little sugar to taste. Cool overnight and blend with fresh basil and pack into 4 cup containers for freezing. We love the simple rustic freshness of the marinara. Good on anything from pizza, pasta to dipping good bread.

Jenise, you and I have the same history with Marinara Sauce. Exactly. In fact, to this day, given the choice (when eating out) I go for al'olio about 98% of the time.
Len has always LOVED marinara and I finally "got it" when I had his Mom's recipe (she is Polish but got it from an Italian woman--as you know Boston has a large Italian population.)
It's about the same as the one you describe. She does saute one small onion first. It also calls for a pinch of sugar (I use brown and add a bit more than a pinch.) some crushed red pepper (flakes). I use this sauce when I make spaghetti and meatballs (Patsy's NY Restaurant version of the meatballs) to which I also add sliced Italian sausage. One of Len's all-time most requested dinners.

[Jenise]

Jenise, you and I have the same history with Marinara Sauce. Exactly. In fact, to this day, given the choice (when eating out) I go for al'olio about 98% of the time.
Len has always LOVED marinara and I finally "got it" when I had his Mom's recipe (she is Polish but got it from an Italian woman--as you know Boston has a large Italian population.)
It's about the same as the one you describe. She does saute one small onion first. It also calls for a pinch of sugar (I use brown and add a bit more than a pinch.) some crushed red pepper (flakes). I use this sauce when I make spaghetti and meatballs (Patsy's NY Restaurant version of the meatballs) to which I also add sliced Italian sausage. One of Len's all-time most requested dinners.

I often add crushed red peppers too, depending on the day. Bob has finally warmed up to heat flavors, so I can ramp up whenever I want to. For so long, what was my 'mild' was his 'hot'. Try this sometimes without the onion, compare the difference. I love the purity of just garlic and herbs, and the way it's all there to frame the tomato. You even taste the olive oil. Which is not to say that I don't like onion, but another pasta sauce we love is a l'amatriciana in which the onion is as essential as the bacon. To make the marinara wholly and completely different, it's wonderful to let the tomato and garlic get all the attention.

I do mine a bit oddly.

First I puree onion, garlic and carrot in a food processor so it doesn't have any chunks. I brown that concoction in olive oil until the it cooks and gets slightly browned. I then add some red wine. At this point it doesn't look appetizing, but it will!

After the wine cooks down, I add pureed fresh tomatoes from market and a can of San Marzano. Season with salt, pepper, oregano thyme and parsley. I cook this from 1 to umpteen hours until it tastes done.

After it cools I freeze in pint jars.