Small Win #6: The final word on tomato sauce

Sublimely simple: just 3 ingredients + no chopping!

Sep 14, 2024

I considered not sharing this recipe with you.

Not because I wanted to keep it a secret, but because this sauce has been talked about incessantly on the internet for well over two decades: in the New York Times, by Kristen Miglore at Food 52, by Rachel Roddy on her old blog, by Deb Perelman at Smitten Kitchen — the list goes on. My initial thinking was: surely we don’t need another person bringing up the genius of this tomato sauce for the millionth time?

And then I remembered: the world’s a pretty big place and you can almost never repeat something too many times. So if you have never been touched by the wonders of Marcella Hazan’s Tomato Sauce with Onion and Butter, let me introduce you now. Minimalist, velvety, effortless — it’s a recipe that will serve you for the rest of your life, sticking with you not only because of its flavour but because it’s practically impossible to forget.

And, by the way, even if you have come across this recipe before, it’s worth knowing that it works beautifully with olive oil too, which makes it even more versatile.

Love,
Alexina

Coming up on Small Wins — how to cut an onion (it’s not the way they do it at Le Cordon Bleu), what they don’t tell you about cooking rice + the very best banana bread (including 3 ways to level up your cakes)

For my Small Wins+ community — This month it’s everything you need to know about pasta, and next month we’ll be doing the same for potatoes! Here’s what to expect: the potato variety that outshines Maris Pipers (I said it!), the easiest and best potatoes, mashed potato for every season, perfect dauphinoise straight from Paris, my friend Jamie’s best ever baked potatoes, fries without fuss + 5 tips for the best roasties.

Tomato sauce and its many merits

Nailing an excellent tomato sauce will upgrade much of your cooking. It’ll enable you to whip up the simplest, yet most delicious pasta or gnocchi. It’ll help you nail a margherita pizza. It’ll add layers of flavour to your melanzane and richness to your spaghetti and meatballs. A tomato sauce is such a hard-working staple in the kitchen that if you can make a superior one, it will pay dividends. Bonus points if that superior tomato sauce is also supremely easy — which brings us onto…

Does anyone else hate having to chop an onion?

This sauce is not only simple because of the limited number of ingredients (tomatoes, onion, butter, salt) but because it does not require you to chop an onion — a task that, quite frankly, I find a bit irritating (it’s up there with prepping garlic for me). Don’t get me wrong: I do it. I chop an onion most days. Because no one can argue that onions don’t pull their weight in the flavour department. But when I discovered that I could make a knockout tomato sauce simply by halving an onion (requiring just one simple swoop of the knife)? Well, I’ll never go back.

One of the most important ingredients in the kitchen

Of course we have butter to thank in this recipe, and many a French chef will tell you that this ingredient is the difference between food that is good and food that is great. But I’m going to advocate for another feature of this recipe — one of the reasons that I believe this tomato sauce is superior — and it all comes down to a reasonably lengthy (but hands-off) cooking time.

I have already spoken about this in the newsletter but I will continue to repeat myself: time is a key ingredient in cooking and shouldn’t be underestimated. With time this sauce transforms into something silky and flavourful and balanced. It’s magic.

As for the instruction from Marcella to wait for the fat to float to the top (which takes time!), this is advice you should heed when making any kind of rich sauce, from tomato ones such as this to curries of all kinds. It’s advice that 2012 MasterChef winner Shelina Permaloo also shares a lot in her recipes and if I know one thing it’s this: if both Marcella and Shelina are advising me to do something, I’m going to do it — and you should too.

Marcella Hazan’s Tomato Sauce with Onion + Butter

Adapted from Marcella Hazan’s Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking

Makes enough to serve 4 to 6 over pasta

Ingredients

2 x 400g can of peeled, whole tomatoes, best you can get (I typically use Mutti)
70g butter
1 medium white onion, peeled and cut in half
1/2 to 1 tsp Maldon salt, to taste

Method

Melt the butter gently in a large pan, then place the onion halves in the butter, cut-side down. Allow the onion to infuse into the butter for a couple of minutes before adding the tomatoes, their juice and a 1/2 teaspoon of salt. Cue some pleasing ASMR:
Being careful not to burn yourself, go through and gently crush the whole tomatoes with your hands (this personal touch is an act of love that translates to the final sauce, I’m certain of it).
Gently simmer the sauce for 40 minutes, giving it the occasional stir, until the fat floats free of the tomatoes. Taste and add more salt, if needed. Remove the onion and discard, then serve as desired. The sauce can be pureed to a smooth texture by using an immersion blender, if desired.

Variations

You can switch the butter with olive oil should you want a fresher-tasting tomato sauce — or indeed one that’s vegan. Use a good quality olive oil: a recipe like this, with so few ingredients, demands it.
You can make this with fresh tomatoes that have been skinned and coarsely chopped — or skip the skinning step if you’re planning to puree it all at the end.
For an easy, high-protein midweek meal simply add a can or two of tinned tuna to the sauce and allow to simmer for 5 minutes on the stove before serving. I particularly enjoy this with the Mr Organic Wholemeal Spaghetti.

Storage: Will keep for up to a week in the fridge.

A footnote on the great Italian olive oil-butter divide

village under clear sky — San Quirico d'Orcia, Italy (image by Giuseppe Mondì via Unsplash)

Though many of us hold strong associations between Italian cuisine and olive oil, Italian cookery is traditionally divided by its use of cooking fats. The North tend towards butter, whilst central and southern Italy rely on olive oil (although it should be said that all regions of Italy are united in their use of pork fat).

Each leaning derives from the land: in the richer North (home to Emilia-Romagna, where Parmigiano-Reggiano hails, and the Alpine regions bordering France, Switzerland and Austria) there have always been the natural and fiscal resources to raise excellent breeds of cattle from which exemplary butter is made. Meanwhile in Southern and Central Italy — particularly the sun-soaked regions of Puglia and Sicily — the land is blanketed by ancient olive trees.

I’d wager that most of us would default to starting an Italian tomato sauce with olive oil, but Marcella was born in Emilia-Romagna which explains the butter in this recipe — an ingredient that complements the acidity of the tomatoes rather than cancelling it out (as the addition of sugar tends to do). It’s a small culinary miracle — but certainly not the only example of the joys of butter.

DISCLOSURES

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