The Best Roasted Tomato Sauce
This is an easy, low-effort, yet high-impact tomato sauce recipe. It starts with high quality ingredients - good olive oil and good tomatoes. The rest we can attribute to the technique.
While I’ve been making versions of this rich sauce for a while, it isn’t anything necessarily groundbreaking or original. It’s a simple sauce that has an incredible body and a rich depth of flavor with hardly any of the work. Italians likely have been making their own versions for decades, since it pulls on their traditional technique of leaving garlic whole. I started cooking with whole cloves within the past two years and have learned to prefer its function in recipes - it adds a flavor that’s less stringent and punchy, and more true to what you smell.
My iterations of this sauce only got better after I explored both Don Angie’s and Missy Robbins’ cookbooks, which call for their own ratios and ingredients for the simple sauce. This recipe (if you could call it that!) is just my perfect method. It uses whole peeled San Marzano tomatoes, which we crush by hand. These tomatoes get poured into a garlic-scented olive oil which is the key to the entire recipe, really. The sauce itself is quite oily, which you’ll notice throughout the cooking process. This is on purpose! The fat carries flavor and adds body. Once you toss it with pasta and add cheese, the texture is dreamy and rich.
I heat a lot of fruity extra virgin olive oil in a Dutch oven until it’s hot enough to fry the whole cloves. Once they’re golden and fragrant, they’re removed from the pot and the tomatoes are poured in. This oil leeches into the sauce, scenting the entire pot with the taste of caramelized garlic. All of the ingredients work together in unison, as the fat carries all of the flavor and body you need to round out the sauce, while the tomatoes add a bright, acidic pop that’s born to coat pasta. You can stop here and season with a hefty handful of salt, then use right away in dishes where the sauce will be baked and cooked down, like baked ziti or eggplant parm. Roasting the sauce low and slow breaks down the tomatoes more, which enhances the flavor a bit further, so I will do this if I have time. I like that it’s a hands-free way to cook the sauce, without needing to monitor it on the stove. I also find that this makes the sauce easier to digest, so if you have a sensitive stomach like me, taking the extra step may help.
When I have fresh basil (and when it fits the dish I am using the sauce for), I will use Don Angie’s method of steeping a few big sprigs in the cooked sauce for 30 minutes - its really all you need to add flavor to the batch.
THE BEST ROASTED TOMATO SAUCE
makes about 3 pints (or about 6 scant cups) of sauce
Ingredients
1/3 cup good quality extra virgin olive oil
5 garlic cloves, crushed, peeled, and left whole
2 28-ounce cans of whole peeled San Marzano tomatoes*
1 to 1 1/2 tablespoons kosher salt
2 to 3 sprigs of fresh basil**
Instructions
Preheat the oven to 350F.
To a large bowl, add both cans of whole tomatoes (save the cans - we will use the extra tomato residue). If the tomatoes are packed with basil, remove those leaves now. Use your hands to squeeze and crush the tomatoes until they’re the consistency you like. I prefer them a little chunky, as the bright pops of tomato add some texture and flavor contrast! Set this to the side.
In a heavy-bottomed pot (I use and prefer enameled cast iron Dutch ovens), heat the olive oil on medium heat. Once it’s hot and shimmering, about three minutes, add in your whole garlic cloves.
Fry the garlic cloves until they are a deep golden color all around, turning them around as they cook, taking care not to burn them (see photo above for the color). This should take around five minutes. Remove the garlic cloves from the pot immediately, so they don’t burn. You can toss them, or you can save them for another use (they’re delicious blended into a dressing or dip).
Turn the heat off, and carefully add in the tomatoes. They will splatter, so be careful — turning the heat off tends to help with this! Add around 1/4- to 1/2-cup of water to one of the tomato cans and swirl it around, passing it onto the other can of tomato to release the extra tomato off of the sides. Pour this into the sauce.
Once the tomatoes are in, add in 1 tablespoon of salt and bring this to a boil. After it boils, cover it with the lid, and put it in the oven to roast for 1 hour (you can stir halfway, if you’d like).
Once it is done roasting, stir it well to redistribute the oil, then taste it. Add the additional 1/2 tablespoon of salt if you’d like (this is the measurement I prefer - I like my food well seasoned). It’s delicious as is and very versatile - feel free to cool and store it at this point! But, if you’d like to take it a step further, you can steep two to three basil sprigs in for around 30 minutes. Be sure to remove the basil leaves before you store it. Glass containers are best for this sauce, since the oil is fragrant and the tomatoes will stain. Keep in the fridge for a week or two, or freeze for three to four months tops to use for later.
Notes
*Must be a product of Italy, and a DOP label is preferred for the best taste.
**I don’t always steep basil in, because it isn’t always needed with some recipes. I do, however, like to add it in whenever I have it on hand, since it does enhance the tomato flavor. So add it if you have it!
