The Secret To Amazing Tomato-Based Sauce: Roasting It In The Oven

The Secret To Amazing Tomato-Based Sauce: Roasting It In The Oven

If you want to take your favourite tomato sauce recipe to the next level, roasting it in the oven will enhance the flavour and requires less babysitting.

Photo by Danielle Griscti.

Everyone should know how to make some kind of basic tomato or marinara sauce. It’s tasty, versatile and easy to do once you learn the basics. If you’re looking for an easy way to improve your preferred tomato-based sauce, Kristen Miglore at Food52 suggests you skip the simmering and go for the oven:

It starts the usual way sauces do — sauté onion and garlic, add some chile flakes, then booze, then tomatoes, but then it swerves off course. Here’s the secret to its success: You take this perfectly adequate sauce and roast it in the oven for an hour and a half [at 190°C]. The sauce concentrates and the tomatoes caramelise and turn jammy, melding with all the other flavours more conclusively than they would in a speedier stovetop number… This oven-roasting technique is a boon to tomato sauces everywhere — not just vodka. Try it on marinara, puttanesca, amatriciana, maybe even Marcella.

You have to roast your sauce for a while, so you’ll have to plan ahead, but you also don’t need to worry about babying it. That time can easily be used to prepare the rest of your meal or take care of other chores around your home. Better flavour and less work; sounds like a win to me.

A Genius Technique for the Best Vodka Pasta (And Better Marinara, Too) [Food52]


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