Kitchn and Yahoo may earn commission from links in this article. Pricing and availability are subject to change.
Credit: Photo: Alex Lepe; Food Styling: Rachel Perlmutter
There are few recipes that are as simple, beloved, and reliable as Marcella Hazan’s famous tomato sauce. It’s a master class in restraint — an ideal example of how less is sometimes more, and that you don’t always need a ton of ingredients to make something truly stellar. That said, the brain of a recipe developer never rests. So when I came across a tweak, I wondered: Is it possible to improve upon this near-perfect sauce without fundamentally changing it? The answer, as it turns out, is a resounding yes.
How to Upgrade Marcella Hazan’s Famous Tomato Sauce
I came across this little tweak in one of the best cookbooks I’ve read this year: Ella Quittner’s Obsessed With The Best. The author endeavors to find the best (to her) way to prepare a great many dishes — a practice I’m all too familiar with. While the optimizations to dishes across the book range from minor to dramatic, this one is so minor as to barely register as a change at all. There are no extra ingredients and barely any extra work. It’s an elegant way to streamline a recipe that’s already practically one uninterrupted motion.
Bookshop
Marcella’s three-ingredient recipe consists of simmering tinned tomatoes, butter, and an onion together in one pot. After testing many different versions, Ella landed on simply browning the onion in the butter before adding the tomatoes. That one move gives the sauce a more complex flavor, without needing to add so much as one additional ingredient.
Caramelizing the onion in the butter adds “another subtle layer of flavor and sweetness that doesn’t overshadow the tomato, but which is, in all its faint brown buttery glory, magnificently naughty,” according to Quittner. As someone who’s made Marcella’s original sauce dozens of times, I was pleasantly surprised at how this little change enhanced the flavor of the sauce without fundamentally changing it. It’s the same sauce — just deeper and slightly richer, with a pleasant nutty back note from the browned butter.
A Few Tips
Cut the onion into quarters. Marcella’s recipe calls to halve the onion, but Ella cuts the onion into quarters, which gives you more surface area for browning.
Keep an eye on the heat. True caramelization takes time, and you don’t want the butter to burn while you’re waiting for the magic to happen. Lower the heat if the butter starts to darken past a light golden-brown.
Be patient. Don’t be tempted to turn the onions until they’re good and browned on the side in contact with the pan. That deep caramelization is what makes this tweak worth it.
Further Reading
I Tried Every Possible Way to Bake a Potato, and Found the Curveball Trick I’ll Now Follow Forever
We Tried 8 Methods of Cooking Bacon and Found an Absolute Winner
The $15 Amazon Find That Finally Decluttered My Kitchen Drawers and Countertop
