Cookeya

Simple Tomato Sauce

Simple Tomato Sauce takes about 30 min and serves 4. It needs 5 ingredients: tinned tomatoes, garlic, olive oil, basil, and salt. It is rated easy to make.

Total time
30 min
Serves
4
Difficulty
Easy

Ingredients

  • 2 tins of good plum tomatoes
  • 3 garlic cloves, sliced thin
  • 4 tbsp olive oil
  • a few sprigs of basil
  • salt, to taste

Method

  1. Warm the garlic gently

    Put the garlic and oil in a cold pan and bring them up to a slow sizzle together. Started in hot oil the garlic browns and turns acrid before it has flavoured anything.

    4 min
  2. Crush the tomatoes in

    Crush the tomatoes into the pan with your hands rather than blending them. Hand-crushed, you get texture; blended, the seeds break up and the sauce turns thin and slightly bitter.

  3. Simmer down

    Simmer, uncovered, at a steady blip until the sauce has reduced by about a third and pools of orange oil sit on the surface. That separation is the visual sign it is done.

    20 min
  4. Season at the end

    Take it off the heat, tear in the basil and season. Salting early, before reduction, is how sauces end up over-salted — the volume drops but the salt does not.

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