Deb’s basic sauce steals the show with savoury sausage meatballs.
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Debbie Quinn has a lifelong love of food and cooking, nurtured in her parents’ restaurants and in her own family’s kitchen. Every fortnight she shares her passion and expertise with our readers, bringing her best recipes, tips and tricks to the table.
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This sauce is so easy. With just five ingredients, it makes the best red Italian tomato sauce. It’s fabulous for any pasta dish, as a tomato base for homemade pizza or just on toast.
Gather these essentials to craft Deb’s basic ‘liquid gold’ Italian tomato sauce.
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Ingredients
⅓ cup extra-virgin olive oil
8 cloves garlic, thinly sliced
1 tsp dried red chilli flakes
6 x 400g cans Mutti Polpa finely chopped tomatoes
Sea salt to taste
Method
Place a large, heavy pot over low heat. Add the oil and garlic and simmer gently until aromatic but without colour, 30 seconds to 1 minute. Add the chilli flakes and simmer for another 30 seconds.
Add the tomatoes and their juice and cook over low heat until the flavours are well blended, 25 to 30 minutes. You are not looking to reduce the mixture, just to bring the flavours together. Season with sea salt.
The sauce is ready to use just as it is, garnished with fresh chopped parsley and grated parmesan or pecorino cheese. It’s delicious on its own; however, the options for this base sauce are endless.
Options
You could add gourmet thick pork sausages, such as pork and fennel, which go so well with this sauce. I did this for dinner last week. Simply remove the skins of the sausage, roll them into small balls or break them up into medium pieces, and pan-fry them in 2 tablespoons of olive oil. Toss them around over medium heat to brown them slightly, then add them to the sauce and simmer for 15 to 20 minutes, and you have a lovely sausage pasta.
It’s also delicious with green king prawns; just clean the prawns, slice them through the centre (not all the way through, just to butterfly them), and sauté them in 2 tablespoons of butter and 1 tablespoon of olive oil on a low to medium heat until just cooked. Have your sauce warmed through and your pasta ready, leaving a couple of tablespoons of pasta water with the pasta. Add the sauce to the pasta and heat it. Serve the pasta in your favourite bowls and top each bowl with the delicious prawns. Dill sprigs make a great garnish for this version.
Deb’s tips
This sauce recipe is suitable for freezing and is very handy to have in the freezer as a ready-made base for any pasta sauce. You will only need half the sauce from this recipe to prepare one meal, so pop the rest in the freezer for next time.
If you don’t like chilli, leave it out, or you can just use ½ tsp if you prefer.
Mutti canned tomatoes are available at most supermarkets and are one of my favourite tinned tomatoes for sauces, unless you are lucky enough to get hold of the real deal, homemade passata, from one of your lovely Italian friends.
If you are using different cans of tomatoes, sometimes they can have an acidic taste. You can add a couple of teaspoons of sugar to balance out the flavour.
Deb recommends only the best tomatoes.
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