If you are familiar with Marcella Hazan’s tomato sauce with onion and butter, you know it is made with three ingredients, four if you count salt. How then, you might be wondering, can such a sauce be simplified? Simply: by using unpeeled tomatoes. Here, the ingredients are the same as Marcella Hazan’s tomato sauce but there’s no scoring of the tomatoes and blanching them to remove their skins, and there’s no discarding of the halved onion at the end. Everything, rather, is puréed together at the end. Here’s the how-to:

Homemade Tomato Sauce in 4 Simple Steps

Taste your fresh, bright tomato sauce, then smile for days as you put it on everything: pizza, pasta, crispy eggplant rounds, savory monkey bread, eggplant involtini, zucchini involtini, summer squash gratin, etc. Friends, should you find yourself with a haul of tomatoes, this modified Marcella tomato sauce recipe might come in handy. I think we’ve picked the last from our little raised bed, which did well this year, treating us to a good run of bagel-cream cheese-and-tomato breakfasts. I’m not ready for fall. PS: ALL the tomato recipes here.

Here’s the visual play-by-play for making a simplified Marcella tomato sauce:

  1. Melt a stick of butter.

  2. Slice two large onions (typically I use white) and add to melted butter.

  3. Sweat onions for 15 minutes or until they …

  4. turn white! Kidding. Cook until the onions are soft.

  5. Meanwhile, dice four pounds of tomatoes.

  6. Add them to the pot with a teaspoon of kosher salt.

  7. Bring to a simmer. After five minutes, the tomatoes will look like this:

  8. After about an hour, they look like this:

  9. Purée the sauce with an immersion blender, or transfer to a food processor or blender (taking care the lid is on tightly lest it blow off during the whirring).

  10. Transfer puréed sauce to storage containers. These are my favorite: 1-Quart Deli Containers Such a great size for all sorts of foods.

  11. Use sauce in your favorite recipes, perhaps a roasted eggplant and Swiss chard lasagna? Stay tuned. 4.7 from 13 reviews Here I’ve doubled the quantities of the original recipe, so feel free to make a half batch or multiply the quantities if you wish, too.

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