23 Sep Use the Oven to Make the Best Darned Italian American Red Sauce You’ve Ever Tasted
Here’s a recipe from J. Kenji López-Alt, the Managing Culinary Director of Serious Eats, that your absolutely going to want to have so you can make “The Best Darned Italian American Red Sauce You’ve Ever Tasted.”
Great ingredients and a long stay in a low oven are the keys to the best Italian-American Red Sauce.
I’ve been hitting the sauce hard recently.
I’m talking red sauce here. You might know it as gravy. The Italian-American staple that launched a thousand restaurants. While its origins are undoubtedly in Italy, the slow-cooked tomato sauce served in the red-checked tablecloth restaurants up and down the East Coast (not to mention the homes in New Jersey) is as American as it gets.
This isn’t a light and fresh pomodoro sauce. It’s not the kind of sauce you throw together for a weeknight meal. It’s not the sauce you heat up from a jar, and it’s certainly not the marinara sauce that you apply sparingly to perfectly al dente spaghetti.
This is red sauce. The slow-cooked, rib-sticking Italian-American stew designed to fill you up with equal parts flavor and pride. It’s the kind of sauce for which you open up the windows while you’re cooking just to make sure that everyone else in the neighborhood knows what you’re up to. It’s the kind of sauce kids defend the honor of in grade school.* It’s the kind of sauce you want your meatballs swimming in, your chicken parm bathed in, and the sauce that you want not just tossed with your spaghetti, but spooned on top in quantities that’d make a true Italian cry out in distress.
*”My mom cooks her sauce for 5 hours.” “Yeah? Well my mom cooks hers for 6 hours.” “Well MY mom cooker hers for 7 hours, and she crushes the garlic with her bare hands!”
This is the kind of sauce that restaurants in Little Italy rested their reputations on—back when Little Italy restaurants had actual reputations to maintain. We’re talking all day sauce here. The kind of sauce that starts with the simplest ingredients—some canned tomatoes, a few aromatics, some olive oil, and maybe some basil—and alchemically transforms them into something so good that families can be built around it.
The kind of sauce that tastes like it took all day to make, because it really took all day to make.
And one thing’s for damn sure: if I’m going to take all day to make something (or more importantly, try and convince you to do so), then it had better be worth every second of my time and then some.
After dozens of tests, I’m willing to do what those Little Italy restaurants of yore once did: stake my reputation on it. This is the second best red sauce you’ve ever tasted.*
*There’s no way I’m going to compete with grandma here.
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