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Featured in 14 Recipes That Make the Most Canned Tomatoes
A good tomato sauce is the foundation for so many wonderful dishes—pizza, pasta, chicken, and fish.
Here is a recipe for a basic tomato sauce that starts with a soffritto of onions, carrots, and celery cooked in a little olive oil, to which garlic, tomatoes and seasonings are added.
Simple and delicious!
The sauce can be dressed up with mushrooms, sausage, olives, wine, and all manner of vegetables. What’s your favorite tomato sauce recipe?
Basic Tomato Sauce Recipe
Ingredients
- 2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
- 1/2 medium onion, finely chopped
- 1 small carrot or 1/2 large carrot, finely chopped
- 1 small stalk of celery, including the green tops, finely chopped
- 2 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley
- 1 clove garlic, minced
- 1/2 teaspoon dried basil or 2 Tbsp chopped fresh basil
- 1 28 oz. can whole tomatoes, including the juice, or 1 3/4 pound of fresh tomatoes, peeled, seeded, and chopped
- 1 teaspoon tomato paste
- Salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
Method
1 Gently cook the onion, carrot, celery, and parsley: Heat olive oil in a large wide skillet on medium heat. Add the chopped onion, carrot, celery and parsley. Stir to coat.
Reduce the heat to low, cover the skillet and cook for 15 to 20 minutes, stirring occasionally until the vegetables are softened and cooked through.
2 Add garlic: Remove cover and add the minced garlic. Increase the heat to medium high. Cook for garlic for 30 seconds.
3 Add tomatoes, tomato paste, basil, salt, pepper, then simmer: Add the tomatoes, including the juice and shredding them with your fingers if you are using canned whole tomatoes. Add the tomato paste and the basil. Season with salt and pepper to taste.
Bring to a low simmer, reduce the heat to low and cook, uncovered until thickened, about 15 minutes.
Optional, purée for smooth sauce: If you want you can push the sauce through a food mill, or purée it in a blender or with an immersion blender, to give it a smooth consistency.
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Elise Bauer is the founder of Simply Recipes. Elise launched Simply Recipes in 2003 as a way to keep track of her family's recipes, and along the way grew it into one of the most popular cooking websites in the world. Elise is dedicated to helping home cooks be successful in the kitchen. Elise is a graduate of Stanford University, and lives in Sacramento, California.
Basic Tomato Sauce
I wish SR would differentiate between a basic tomato sauce that is used for other recipes and a flavored marinara sauce or other pasta sauce. If you buy Hunts tomato sauce for instance, it is simply a base for other recipes. The above recipe is a marinara sauce.
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Hi Bill, were you looking for a recipe for a homemade version such as what you’d find in a can of Hunt’s tomato sauce? The nomenclature of tomato sauces and products is confusing, we agree. A number of readers in Australia have been thrown off by some of our recipes calling for tomato sauce because that’s what they call ketchup there, and what we’d call tomato sauce is called tomato passata there. But a lot of Americans grew up with prepared jarred spaghetti sauce or marinara sauce, referring to it generically as “tomato sauce” (including me), and calling this recipe that enables them to find it by a quick internet search.
It is very confusing. I am in Ecuador and just bought catsup by accident. 84 cents gone LOL. No tomato sauce here The answer is yes a replacement for Hunts. I settled on equal amounts tomato paste and water. Worked great.
It’s Ok really. Not 2bad. Very red.
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I made this recipe last summer because I had a lot of fresh tomatoes. My family loved it so I know make it all summer as long as I have fresh tomatoes. Love it!!!!!!!!!
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i didnt make the recipe, but i recomend grating the carrots
finer, easier, better out come, cause carrots are kinda hard to cook down so grating it is just logical to do for a shotcut and better product
Why not puree the veggy mixture bvefore you simmer the tomatoes?
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Because that thick sludge will not mix and cook well with the tomatoes; best to have all the veggies cook and simmer together and then, if you want a puree, to blend them all together.