The tomatoes and onions are in, so this past weekend I tried out a couple of new tomato sauce recipes.
The first recipe I tried was Giada De Laurentiis’ Simple Tomato Sauce. While quite tasty, and representative of the flavor of a nice basic tomato sauce, the use of carrots in the mirepoix gave the overall sauce a bizarre orange color. However, for me this was not a problem, since my overall goal was to use the sauce as an ingredient in another sauce, the Bechamel Sauce. Giada uses this in her Classic Italian Lasagna. The Bechamel Sauce sauce turned out to be quite tasty. A cream sauce, we served it over linguine with a generous sprinkle of grated Parmesan cheese. It had a wonderful flavor — substantial, but not overpowering. It would make an excellent accompaniment to any delicately flavored dish — like chicken or seafood.
The second recipe I tried was Alton Brown’s (roasted) Tomato Sauce. His original recipe calls for Roma tomatoes, but I used Better Boys, since that was what we grew this year. They produced lovely classic red globes, slightly larger than a baseball. Fortunately for me, in addition to calling out the number of Roma tomatoes he wanted, he also said to halve them and place them cut side up in two 13 by 9-inch pans. So, I just started halving and seeding my Better Boys until I had filled my pans. It turns out that while he called for 20 Romas, I ended up using 12 Better Boys. I always seed my tomatoes for sauce. The recipes never call for this, though this one did. I find my sauce is too watery otherwise. In this recipe, you roast the tomatoes with olive oil, chopped onion, garlic, salt, pepper, oregano, and thyme for two and one half hours. After this, you are supposed to run the lot through a food mill. This separates out the skins and gives the tomato meat a nice texture. I do not have a food mill, so I ended up picking the skins out of the pot with tongs and running the remainder through the low setting on my blender. The appearance of the sauce — the color and consistency — was exactly as I remember the sauce of the Italian women in the neighborhood of northeast Ohio where I grew up. The smell was wonderful and the sample taste promised of great things. Unfortunately, I finished up too late to try it on pasta. I hope to do that tonight.
I went home over lunch and talked my wife into having pasta for dinner, so I’ll be sure to get to try it out tonight.
Well, we tried the sauce. It’s actually quite good. It would be better with some meatballs or some hot Italian sausage simmered in it for a few hours, but overall a very good authentic sauce.