Dear Katie,

I too have continued to cook but stopped writing about it. Forgive me! To be fair, we did need to take a brief hiatus to meet up in southern California, which was lovely. I’m getting back to it because I made something so fantastic that Eric immediately asked me if I was going to blog about it, which I consider to be a pretty good endorsement.

It seems odd to be gushing about plain old tomato sauce, especially one that has four ingredients (one of which is salt). But I’m not the first one. After seeing articles and blog posts about how Marcella Hazan created the consummate tomato sauce recipe, I had it on my to do list for a while. When I got my weekly CSA email noting that it was the height of tomato season and we could purchase an additional five pounds (!!!) of large red tomatoes for $4, I figured it was a sign.

I approached the recipe with a healthy dose of skepticism. It felt wrong to make a tomato sauce without diced onion and minced garlic. No basil, oregano, bay leaves, chili flakes… no herbs or spices of any kind? Butter instead of olive oil? I’m a firm believer in tinkering with a recipe but only after making it at least once as written, so I ignored my instincts and embraced the simplicity of the recipe. I did make one exception to my rule: I tweaked the amount of butter (you’ll see why).

Tomato Sauce a la Marcella Hazan

Makes… a lot. This is roughly triple the recipe you’ll find online. I only make tomato sauce in absurd quantities.

Approximately 5 pounds fresh large tomatoes (no need to be exact, we had closer to 5.5 pounds)
One stick (8 tbsp) butter
2-3 large onions, peeled and halved (I used 2.5 onions because I had half an onion hanging around)
Salt to taste

Peel the tomatoes: Fill a large pot/dutch oven about halfway with water and bring to a boil. Fill a large mixing bowl with very cold or ice water. Using a paring knife, cut an X in the bottom of the tomatoes, about an inch or two in length and just deep enough to break the peel. Boil the tomatoes in batches of 5-10 tomatoes (depending on size) for about a minute, just until the cut part of the peel starts to pull away from the tomato. Fish out the tomatoes with a strainer and immediately transfer them to the cold water. Once the tomatoes are cool, they should peel easily. Remove the core from the peeled tomatoes and chop roughly into large pieces. Alternately… use canned whole tomatoes and skip all of this.

Make the sauce: Discard the water from the large pot and add the tomatoes, butter, and onions. Cook over medium heat until the mixture starts to boil, stirring occasionally. Reduce the heat so that the mixture simmers and let it cook uncovered for at least two hours. Stir periodically, crushing the tomato pieces against the side of the pot with the spoon. The mixture will be thin at first but will thicken as the tomatoes break down. Remove the onion. Season with salt to taste.

Holy. Smokes. This sauce is good. It’s exactly what tomato sauce should taste like, except the butter adds an unexpected twist that somehow makes it taste even more tomatoey and wonderful. I know that adding a stick of butter seems like cheating, but it does make a ton of sauce. Also, if I had used the proportions from the original recipe, I would have needed almost twice as much butter as I used… so, y’know, restraint. The recipe says to discard the onion but instead, we chopped it roughly and saved it because OBVIOUSLY.

I lost track of how long I cooked the sauce for but it was at least two hours, probably more like three. Because of the volume, it took a while to make sure all of the tomatoes were broken down to the extent I wanted, and I’ve always been a proponent of simmering tomato sauce for an eternity. If you start with canned tomatoes, the only prep needed is peeling and halving the onions. While peeling the tomatoes is an extra step, it really wasn’t that much of a hassle. It’s like some sort of culinary magic trick where you just dump minimal ingredients in a pot and out comes the best sauce ever.

For dinner, we used the sauce on whole wheat penne with sauteed bell peppers, eggplant, and corn, along with about half of the onions from the sauce. We tossed in some cubed mozzarella (left over from another meal) and topped everything with grated Pecorino Romano and roughly torn basil leaves. We inhaled it. It was so good that I forgot to take pictures because I was so excited to eat it.

I’m setting a goal of weekly updates, so I should be better about keeping you updated on my culinary adventures. Until next time!