I’m trying to perfect the recipe for tomato sauce for pasta. I’ve started by adapting one I found online.

Ingredients:

2 onions or 8 shallots (sweeter), finely chopped
2 carrots, finely chopped
2 sticks celery, finely chopped
4 fat cloves garlic, finely chopped
2 400g tins peeled cherry tomatoes
200ml red wine
1 tbsp dark muscovado sugar
50g finely grated parmesan (as recommended by Jamie Oliver: http://www.jamieshomecookingskills.com/recipe.php?title=bolognese-sauce-with-pasta)

Method notes:

Fry the onions (sprinkled with 1 tsp salt) on their own before adding the carrots, celery and garlic. Then add the other chopped veg and garlic and fry until everything is soft. Then add the rest of the ingredients. Simmer for an hour. Taste for seasoning then liquidize. Best way to make ‘ready meals’ to store in the freezer is to add the finished sauce to freshly cooked pasta. It’s best to add a bit more than just to coat it because pasta is bland and needs a lot of flavouring. This amount of sauce is enough for about 600g dry pasta, cooked.

I think this makes a tasty tomato sauce but it is definitely basic. Further experimentation would be a good idea e.g. the addition of sausage meat like the Jamie Oliver sausage fusilli recipe, or a Spanish style sauce with chorizo in it.

About a month ago I made a tomato sauce for meatballs and spaghetti based on Heston’s tomato fondue recipe. It needed more star anise flavour, more tabasco and maybe more Worcs. sauce too. I cut down the amount of oil, which was fine but I suppose it would have tasted better with more oil. Anyway, that’s another direction I could go in.

Certainly there is more work to be done here.