Chef Bruce Mattel of The Culinary Institute of America demonstrates how easy it is to make homemade tomato sauce. It's a one-pot dish that doesn't require much technique, and you'll get a great result if you use high-quality ingredients. He starts by adding extra-virgin olive oil to a saucepan, then tosses in peeled, sliced garlic. He waits for the garlic to get golden (not brown, which would add bitterness to the sauce), then adds chopped Spanish or yellow onions. Once the onions cook down a bit, he pours in a quart of crushed canned tomatoes. Fresh basil is next: He tears it into small pieces, then adds a pinch of salt and pepper. After stirring the mixture together, he allows it to simmer for 30 minutes to thicken up and develop in flavor. Once it's been simmered, it's ready to be poured over pasta or used in a recipe.
Hi, I'm Chef Bruce Mattel from the Culinary Institute of America, and I'm going to show you this kitchen basic: how to make tomato sauce.
Making your own tomato sauce is very, very easy, and all you have to do is start with really good ingredients. It's a very simple technique, it requires just one pot to cook it in, and here's how you do it.
Take a little bit of extra virgin olive oil - maybe half an ounce or so - and pour it into a sauce pot. Turn on your heat: you want to use pretty much a medium heat here, because the first thing we're going to do is add some nice slivered garlic. This is about two cloves of peeled thinly sliced garlic. You want the garlic to get golden - not necessarily golden brown, because if it gets too brown it's going to be a little bit bitter. You place it in the pot and kind of shake it around a little bit, and watch it carefully, and let it get a nice even golden color. The next ingredient we're going to add is some minced onion; approximately half of a medium sized yellow or Spanish onion would work just fine. The onion will actually cool down the pan just a bit, and add moisture to the pan to prevent the garlic from burning.
I'll stir the onion and garlic mixture, and continue to cook until the onions are pretty much cooked, soft and translucent. It should only take a couple of minutes or so. Sometimes by adding a pinch of salt at this stage, it helps to draw out some of the moisture from the onions and enhance that process.
Now that our onions are soft and translucent, and our garlic is smelling great, I'm going to take these tomatoes and add them to the pot. You want to add them slowly so as not to splatter all over. I have approximately one quart of crushed canned tomatoes. I'm going to stir this around a little bit and incorporate the onions, tomatoes and garlic all together.
Now I'm going to take some fresh basil and, just like an old-style Italian might do, I'm going to tear the basil up into small pieces and just drop it into the sauce. I'll continue to stir the sauce just a little bit, and add a pinch of salt and a pinch of pepper. Then I'll bring the sauce to a nice simmer, stirring occasionally for approximately half an hour, until the flavor develops a little more and we have the desired consistency - one that would hold really nicely on top of pasta.
Our tomato sauce has now thickened quite a bit, it's reduced, the flavors have developed, and it's ready to be used. So we're just going to transfer it to a glass bowl. It smells good! So here you have it: simple tomato sauce.