Recipe: How To Cook Italian Spaghetti Pasta Sauce Explained By An Italian

Well it’s quite simple to cook Italian style spaghetti sauce and today you’re going to learn how to cook it straight from an Italian. My Italian father gave me this recipe and I hold it near and dear to my heart because it is so delicious. If you want to cook a great spaghetti pasta sauce the way your friend’s Nona does it, continue reading.

This sauce can be considered a quick and basic spaghetti sauce but as you start mastering how to make it you can add other ingredients. You can also easily use this sauce for macaroni, Cannelloni, Ravioli, Tortellini, Tagliatelle, and Rigatoni.

Let’s start with the ingredients, and then I’ll tell you how to cook it.

Ingredients

• olive oil
• garlic (3 wedges)
• onions (3/4 of an onion)
• 1 can of tomato paste (optional)
• 10 pre-frozen plum tomatos
• salt (to taste)
• pepper (to taste)
• oregano (to taste)
• basil leaves (3 or 4)
• parmesan cheese

Preparations and cooking the sauce

For starters, it’s the tomatoes that make all the difference with this sauce. You can opt in to using regular tomatoes but in this case we’re going to use frozen tomatoes.

This is how the tomatoes are prepared:

Freeze the tomatoes for at least 6 to 10 hours – so overnight. Then once you’re ready to start making your sauce take the tomatoes out of the freezer and make sure they’re nice and rock hard.

If they are, get a bowl ready, and get the hot water running. When you’re ready, grab a tomatoes and run it under the hot water stream for a brief moment – say about 4 seconds. You’ll notice the tomato skin easily comes off.

Discard the skins, and place the tomato in the bowl. Repeat until all tomatoes of been skinned. 10 plum tomatoes will create enough sauce to feed a family of 4. You can use more if you like.

The next step is to chop up the frozen tomatoes. You can chop them into 4 or six pieces. You should end up with a nice sized pile of chopped up frozen tomato pieces.

Next chop up your garlic into small pieces and do the same with your onions. Your onions don’t have to be as small as the garlic, and the garlic pieces should be small.

Now, turn on your stove to about 5 (half way), and pour your olive oil into the pan or pot. The amount of olive oil should liberally cover the bottom of the pan or pot.

Right after you add the olive oil, add your chopped up garlic and onions and let them sizzle.

You can let them sizzle until they are brown and at this stage you can even start adding a little bit of your salt and pepper, and the other spices in order to imbue the sauce with their tasty splendors.

Now, pour your tomatoes into the pan or pot and bring to a gentle boil.

Once the sauce has reached the gentle boiling point, reduce the heat to a steady simmer.

After a few minutes of simmering, start to add your spices, including topping up the amount of salt and pepper you’re going to use.

Optional: if you want to darken the colour of your sauce or make it a little thicker, after about 15 minutes of simmering, you can add a full or half a can of tomato paste.

Lastly, you can let your sauce cook for an hour, two or three hours but generally after about an hour, she’s ready for consumption.

Make sure to get your noodles boiled a few minutes before you’re ready to serve, or if you’re like me just eat your pasta sauce with toast – delicious!