Who doesn’t love a good marinara sauce? It can be hard to figure out just what to do to make your own, but with these steps and marinara sauce tips, you can learn how to make marinara perfectly every time.
Start With the Right Base
Marinara is primarily tomato sauce. This means that when you are making marinara, you should be choosing the right tomatoes. While you might think that fresh is best, for a sauce, canned is almost always the way to go. The reason for this is that fresh tomatoes have a great deal of juice. This means your sauce is going to be very thin and taste underdeveloped. Try using whole roasted tomatoes from a can for a thick base that is going to taste fantastic.
Consider Consistency
The next thing to keep in mind is the consistency of the sauce. Marinara, despite how smooth most store-bought versions are, does not have to be totally smooth. You can leave some chunks in to give the sauce body and to help it stick better to pizza or pasta. Leaving a few chunks also gives you a burst of flavor when you are eating.
Go for a Simple Sauce
While you may be tempted to add everything you can think of to your sauce, a simple sauce may be best. Add your tomatoes, onions, garlic and spices for a sauce that is simple, but still fantastic. Though you can add extras like carrots and celery or even eggplant, you do want to keep the sauce simple so that it is closer to the roots of the original sauce. Adding extras does make a more complex flavor, but sometimes that is not a good thing. The basic recipes may be the best.
Cook Your Sauce
With a sauce like marinara, you want to allow plenty of time for cooking. You can put it together quickly and if you are in a pinch, you can get it done in under an hour, but the longer you allow a sauce like marinara to cook, the more developed the flavors are going to be. If you are adding onions, for example, you want to cook them first to allow them time to develop flavor and to soften. This will take about 15 minutes. You then want to add your tomatoes and allow them to cook for at least another 20 minutes, preferably longer if you have the time to spare.
Using Your Sauce
The last thing to keep in mind with homemade sauce is how you are going to use it. With marinara sauce, you can use it on pizzas in place of traditional pizza sauce, you can use it on pasta, in lasagna and so much more. If you are using this sauce with pasta you want to remember how to do so. Cook your pasta and add it to a pan. You then need to add some of the sauce and mix. If the sauce is too tight, add a bit of the pasta water to loosen it up. If all else fails, frozen pizza is always a great option for dinner.