Description
This simple and rustic San Marzano Italian tomato sauce is not to be underestimated! With just a few quality ingredients you can be enjoying a big bowl of beautiful, sweet, tomatoey pasta with fresh egg maccheroni noodles! And it only takes 30 minutes. Adults and kiddos alike love this pasta and the sauce is so versatile that you can eat it with just about any pasta shape. Pile on the freshly grated cheese, or eat all by its deliciously sweet self! This pasta sauce recipe serves two hungry adults, but feel free to double it to make it for the family or your next vegan dinner party!
Ingredients
Units
Scale
- 9 ounces fresh San Marzano plum tomatoes, finely diced (about 4 tomatoes) (250g)
- 4 ounces white or purple onion, finely diced (about 1 medium onion), (115g)
- 2 1/2 ounces purple carrot, finely diced (about 1 medium carrot) (70g)
- 2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil (26g)
- 2 medium garlic cloves, smashed (9g)
- 6 ounces maccheroni pasta (or other preferred noodles) (160g)
Instructions
- Blister the garlic. Add the olive oil and garlic to a pot and heat on medium-high cooking the garlic in the oil until it's blistered and fragrant (just a couple of minutes).
- Sauté the onions and carrots. When the garlic is blistered, add the diced onion and carrots, season with salt, and cook until the onions are translucent and have turned a light purple color (if using purple carrots) but not browned.
- Add the tomatoes and finish the sauce. Next, add the diced tomatoes, season with a little more salt, give everything a good stir, place a lid (with no holes) over the top, reduce the sauce to a simmer, cook for approximately 25 minutes. Check the sauce every 5 minutes or so and give it a quick stir, place the lid back on and continue cooking until it's thick and shiny. Turn off the heat while you cook the noodles.
- Cook the pasta. About 5 minutes before the sauce is finished cooking, drop the fresh maccheroni into a pot of lightly salted boiling water and cook for 5 minutes to "al dente" (or as indicated on the package). During the last minute of the pasta cooking time, add about 1/4 cup of pasta cooking water to the sauce and stir it around. Taste the sauce and adjust the seasonings if needed. If the sauce is still too thick, add a spoonful of starchy water at a time until it's the perfect consistency.
- Assemble the pasta. As soon as the pasta is cooked through, strain and place the noodles directly into the pasta sauce, turn the heat on and toss everything together, remove from heat and serve immediately and Enjoy!
Notes
- If you don't want tomato skins in your sauce. If you're starting this recipe using whole tomatoes, you may want to blanch them in boiling water for 30 seconds or until the skins start to come loose from the fruit. When the tomatoes are cool enough to handle, remove the skins and proceed with the recipe. We didn't mind a more rustic take on this tomato sauce with the skins cooked right in. Plus, we needed to use up the already sliced tomatoes from the night before so removing the peels wasn't an option. The pasta sauce is excellent with our without the skins!
- If you don't have purple carrots. Just use regular orange carrots.
- Thin out the sauce using the pasta cooking water. When the pasta noodles are almost finished cooking, add the starchy cooking water to the sauce a little at a time which will help loosen it up. This sauce is a bit on the thicker side because this recipe uses only fresh San Marzano tomatoes and no tomato paste, etc. And San Marzano tomatoes don't have as much juice as canned tomatoes do. Plus, adding starchy water to pasta sauce happens to be a professional technique to make pasta velvety and rich.
- Prep Time: 5 minutes
- Cook Time: 25 minutes
- Category: Pasta
- Method: Stovetop
- Cuisine: Italian
Nutrition
- Serving Size: 1/2
