How to Make: The Best Spaghetti with Tomato Sauce
Growing up, spaghetti with tomato sauce was my favorite dish by far. And since then, not much has changed!
Spaghetti with tomato sauce is a dish that you can’t not like, and it’s been a simple staple in Italian cuisine since as long as I can remember. It’s also easy to make en masse and can be very made to be impressive, making it great for you if you’re a dinner party kind of person. Or, if you just want to add a simple dish to your arsenal, this one always works a treat.
My favorite way to make tomato sauce is by following Marcella Hazan’s amazingly simple recipe and adding some nice spices to it. In my view, tomato sauce should be smooth and velvety, so that it culminates in a really elegant, photo-worthy plate of pasta.
The key to Mrs. Hazan’s amazing recipe is to keep the onions whole, and take them out at the end. This way, the sauce gets infused with all of the taste that we want from the onion, but it stays smooth at the end, with no crunchy onions holding it down. Add a bit of oregano, rosemary or a variety of other italian-style spices, and you’ve got yourself a dish!
Ingredients (2 servings):
1 onion
150-200g spaghetti
A handful of cherry tomatoes (normal tomatoes work fine if you don’t have cherry tomatoes)
2 garlic cloves
A slice of butter
1 can of chopped tomatoes
Parmesan and Pecorino cheese (either of them work if you don’t have both)
A splash of olive oil
A handful of rosemary, basil, and oregano. Other possible spices include sage, parsley, thyme, and any other italian-style spice.
1. Lay out all your ingredients.
2. Start cooking the tomato sauce by throwing in the canned tomatoes, butter, garlic, and onion. Start simmering on low/medium heat. You can cut the garlic if you want, but the onion should go in whole. Remember, we’ve discussed this! ;)
3. After a few minutes, add in the spices, cherry tomatoes, and throw in a splash of olive oil. This will give it that italian flavor. Keep on low heat, cover with lid, and leave to simmer for around 15 minutes. Don’t worry too much about the timing though.
4. Meanwhile, fill a large pot with water for the spaghetti. It should be a large pot so that the spaghetti has space to spread out. Fill with a lot of salt, as is customary for pasta water. It should literally be like sea water. Do not worry about your pasta being too salty, as most of the salt will dissolve in the water.
5. When your water is on a rolling boil (with lots of bubbles), put in the spaghetti. You will have to put the spaghetti in halfway at the start, but submerge the entire length as soon as possible by curving it when it’s soft. We don’t want half our spaghetti to be hard and the other half to be mushy.
6. Once the spaghetti is submerged, we want to cook it al dente. This is undoubtedly the best way to cook pasta. Why? Because the Italians say so!
Check your spaghetti package for the recommended cooking time. We want to cook our spaghetti around 2 or 3 minutes less than what it says on the package. In practice, this will usually be around 7 or 8 minutes.
It’s very important not to overcook our spaghetti!
7. During the 7 to 8 minutes that your spaghetti is boiling, check on your tomato sauce and stir it a few times. It should have a beautiful red color!
This is also the time to remove the onions from the sauce. Since they've been stewing for a while now, they'll have infused their flavor into the sauce and so they've done their job.
Once your spaghetti are done, put the spaghetti into a strainer, and then combine the two in a pot. It’s completely fine to put a little bit of the pasta water into the tomato sauce, in fact it’s encouraged. Pasta water is full of starch that will “fuse” your pasta with the sauce better. Works with every pasta sauce!
8. Cap the dish off with some of the cheese, and don’t forget to make it look nice!
Enjoy!