Classic Marinara Sauce
This is the newest addition to our family…isn’t she just the sweetest thing you have ever laid your eyes on? She is 3 months old on Thursday and I love her more than life itself.
But, since she has nothing to do with marinara sauce, let’s move on…
Anyone else with a garden have tomatoes and basil coming out of their ears? While my northern hemisphere friends are freezing off their extremities just retrieving the mail in the mornings, those of us in the southern hemisphere are in the throws of summer and this means that, if you have a vegetable garden, you are begging your friends to take your tomatoes off your hands.
Don’t beg anymore. Instead, think ahead to winter when all the tomatoes in the grocery store are pink and mushy and lifeless and not worth the small down payment on a house that Pick ‘n Pay and Woolworths would like to charge you. Instead, think to warm, cozy winter nights by the fire, with fire roasted tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches. Instead, think about homemade pizza with fresh tomato sauce, (that you made), bubbling on the crust underneath your cheese.
Now, harvest your tomatoes, bring them inside and let’s start making our own delicious marinara sauce, which you can then use all winter long.
Note: Unless I am baking, which almost always requires measuring ingredients and precise temperatures, I don’t usually cook with recipes. Recipes for me are more of a springboard for ideas and then, since I almost never have the required ingredients at home, I mess with them until they work for me and what I have in the pantry.
So, for this sauce, don’t worry so much about having all of the ingredients in the exact right quantities, just mess with the guideline and make it the way you like it.
You’ll need:
Tomatoes: maybe 20 or 30, depending on how big they are
Red peppers: maybe 4 or 5
Onions: 2 medium sized
Garlic: 2 or 3 cloves, or 2 or 3 tablespoons, minced
Salt and Pepper
Red Wine: a quarter of a cup
Basil: as much as you like
Olive oil
1. Set your oven to 220C/450F
2. Cut up your tomatoes, onions and red peppers in big, rustic, pieces. No perfection or order needed.
3. Place all of these in a roasting dish and season with salt and pepper. Coat with olive oil and toss until each little bit is glistening.
4. Place in oven to roast, probably about 25 – 35 minutes.
Another note: many recipes I have read for homemade marinara sauce have you take out the seeds and flesh of the tomatoes and have you blend and boil this mixture until it’s fully cooked. The problem with this is you loose a lot of the nutrients in the tomatoes and peppers, as many of them are water soluble. Roasting these veggies allows you to reduce the amount of nutrients lost to cooking and as you’ll see later, you leave the seeds and skins of the tomatoes, which means you don’t waste anything and you increase your fibre intake. Just sayin’.
5. In a separate pan, lightly sautee your garlic. Allow the sweet aroma to just start escaping and then take off the heat. You don’t want burnt garlic. Not a fun taste.
6. When your veggies have finished roasting, there will be lots of bubbling, a probably a few browned edges. This is a good thing.
7. Remove from the oven and allow to cool for about 20 minutes.
8. While you’re waiting, pile your basil leaves on top of each other and then start to cut really thin, ribbon-like slices. Set aside.
9. In your blender, throw in tomatoes, garlic and wine and give it a good blend. The colour should be almost a deep orange-red. Delish…
10. Add basil at this point, as it preserves that fresh flavour, rather than getting cooked to death in the roasting pan.
Voila! You now have a basic marinara sauce that can be used on pizza bases, for pasta dishes, as a base for soups and chillis…the possibilities are endless. Well, not really, as not everything taste good with tomato, but you know what I mean.
You can decant this sauce into glass jars and freeze, or ZipLock bags, or Tupperware containers. Whatever makes you happy. I haven’t learned the art of preserving in cans, yet, but hope to get there. In the meantime, we buy Consol’s canning jars at our local Checkers and just freeze the sauce in those, while making sure to leave about 3 centimetres at the top of the jar to allow for liquid expansion in the freezer.
