Aaron's Notes

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Simple Tomato Sauce, Monacilioni Style

This is my variation on my nonna’s simple tomato sauce. All of the women in the family make this. My mother’s family is almost entirely from Monacilioni; this style is common in parts of Molise, and much of the former Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. I’ve met people from Abruzzo, Campagna, and Puglia that all have similar family sauces.

This is a simple, rustic, and fresh sauce. The flavor of the tomatoes is the most important here. It should be fruity, mildly sweet, and aromatic. It is cooked fairly quick and short, and can be thrown together on a weeknight. It can be used as a base for other sauces based on what you have around—meat, fish, aromatics, etc.

I don’t cook from a recipe. I learned to make this from watching my nonna, and then reverse-engineering what I remembered in my college dorm. My main variation from my nonna is the addition of alcohol. I’m writing it down here for posterity, mostly for the sake of my two beautiful daughters, who I hope will pass this down to their children. This should be done by taste, feel, and experience. You want a sweeter sauce? Add more onion. Less pungent? Reduce the garlic. Fresh herbs? Try adding them. Italian cooking is about love and taste, not precision.

Ingredients

  • 28 oz canned or fresh processed tomatoes (see Notes)
  • 1/2 medium onion, diced
  • 1-4 medium garlic cloves, crushed, sliced, or finely minced (your preference)
  • Extra-virgin olive oil
  • Basil, fresh or dried.
  • 1-2 Turkish Bay leaves
  • Salt to taste
  • Optional: ½ cup wine, or 1oz vodka
  • Optional: Fresh Italian parsley

Hardware

  • 3+ quart stock pot or enameled dutch oven (non-reactive!)
  • Wooden spoon or silicone spatula

Directions

  1. Prepare the pan: Put pan on stove on medium-low heat. Coat in olive oil.
  2. Sweat onions: Add onions to pan, sprinkle with a pinch of salt. Cook gently until extremely soft and translucent. The onions should not brown. (Note: this is the final texture the onions will get, as this is a quick sauce that doesn’t simmer all day.)
  3. Add garlic: Add garlic to pan, and sweat until translucent and fragrant.
  4. Add tomatoes and herbs: Add tomatoes, most of the basil, parsley, bay leaf, and alcohol.
  5. Cook tomatoes: Turn the heat to medium-high, stirring frequently. Bring tomatoes to a light boil, then turn down the heat to a simmer. The tomatoes should be just barely bubbling.
  6. Simmer and adjust: Stir the tomatoes every 5 minutes or so. Taste, add salt or olive oil as needed (in very small additions—the sauce will cook down and concentrate the flavors). Simmer for 30-45 minutes.

Serving:

When sauce is completed, if you are serving right away, add a ladel or two of pasta water into the pan, and reduce for another 2-5 minutes, and optionally additional parsley and basil. Toss immediately over pasta, with pecorino romano and olive oil. Don’t add too much sauce to the pasta! Serve it on the side, or refrigerate the rest and use it left-over for another meal.

Not traditional, but better if you’re serving a small group: a skillet to medium-high heat, and coat with a thin layer of olive oil. Add 1 cup of sauce per 1/2 pound of pasta. Heat for 1 minute. Add pasta that is 1-2 minutes under-cooked directly from the boil, along with 1-2 ladles of pasta water, to taste. Add additional parsley and basil. Cook and stir until pasta is done and the sauce is at your desired consistency. Top with additional olive oil, parsely and pecorino romano.

Notes:

  • Tomatoes: The quality of the tomatoes is the single most important thing for this dish. Use fresh tomatoes if and only if they are high-quality and fully ripe. Ideal types of tomatoes are roma or other plum tomatoes, and some heirloom varieties. You want a high flesh to seed ratio. Most grocery store tomatoes are picked green, and turn red when shipping and exposed to ethelene gas. They never fully ripen, and are thus too firm, vegetal tasting, and not suffciently sweet. Quality canned tomatoes (whole or crushed) are better than under-ripe fresh tomatoes.
    • Processing tomatoes: Crushed tomatoes are fine, but whole are typically better (note: I typically use crushed because I’m lazy). If using whole fresh tomatoes, blanch and peel them. Run whole fresh or canned tomatoes through a food mill, or puree in a blender.
  • Heat Management: It is important to control your heat. You don’t want much in the way of maillard flavors here; you are sweating, not browning the aromatics, and you are gently simmering the tomato sauce to meld the flavors together and evaporate excess moisture. You absolutely want to simmer on low heat, and stir frequently. Onions and tomatoes are high in sugar, and thus it’s easy to scortch the bottom of the pan, which will make a bitter, acrid sauce.
  • Alcohol: I typically use either wine or vodka—this is the biggest variation from my nonna’s sauce. The primary purpose is to dissove alcohol-solueable flavors in the tomatoes. Wine also adds more fruit and acidity. Most white wines will do, so long as they aren’t overly sweet. For red wines, most middle-of-the-road red wines are fine, as long as you avoid overly sweet or tanic reds. I typically go for cheap Spanish or Portuguese reds, or cheap chianti or pino noir. If you have a bottle you want to serve with dinner, use that. Alcohol is added during the simmer step, and is not used to deglaze the pan. There should be no fond in the pan, if you’ve managed your heat properly.

Variations:

  • Fish sauce: Omit the onions and replace basil with parsley. in the last 2-3 minutes of cooking, add clams or calamari and optionally clam juice to the sauce. Cook until the fish is just barely cooked. Do NOT add cheese.
  • Meat sauce: use whatever stewing meat you like: chicken legs, pork ribs, beef short ribs, brasciola, sausage, meatballs, etc. Before you sweat the onions, brown whatever meat you have in the pan, remove the meat, and then proceed to sweat the onions. Add the meat and accumulated juices back to the pan, and simmer longer, until the meat is tender, and (if applicable), falls off the bone. Remove the meat and serve after or along-side the pasta.
  • Faux “Bolognese” sauce: This is NOT a proper Ragu alla Bolognese. It’s what my nonna called a Bolognese sauce, and is very hearty and good. Finely mince or grate carrots and celery, and process the onions similarly fine. Brown groud beef, pork, and/or veal in the pan, then add your aromatics and sweat until tender. Then proceed as normal, increasing the cooking time to about an hour.