Weekend Spaghetti Sauce

For a while, this post will be a work-in-progress. This recipe is actually one of the reasons I thought I should start a blog. About a year ago, I iterated on a spaghetti sauce from-scratch. For a while, I’d enjoyed the sauce that came from the Paula Deen recipe for baked spaghetti that I like in my Weeknight Spaghetti Sauce post.

After that, I read about Kenji’s “Best Slow-Cooked Tomato Sauce.” To be honest, I’m ashamed to admit, I liked the baked spaghetti sauce better at first. I concluded that it was probably due to its more processed ingredients of the baked spaghetti sauce (the increased salt being the most likely reason that processing made it taste better to me). Nevertheless, I continued with it, tweaking it (playing around with salts and salt ratios for one) and got it to being good. I felt better about eating it because it was from more whole ingredients and it included some more nutritious stuff, like carrots and I modified it by adding ground flax seed. It wasn’t until our oven broke that I really elevated it to the next level.

You see, I had been working on my grilling game in the meantime. I’d learned about the two-zone cooking method and the loss of our oven led me to naturally start using my grill as an oven. An awesome side effect of this, for some foods, is the smoke. A smoked spaghetti sauce sounded pretty great. It turned out that it was.

So now I had a long simmered, smoked spaghetti sauce that I would make in a mostly full 6-qt enameled cast iron dutch oven. I could freeze this and bring it out on short notice for dinner whenever I wanted. It already had that slow-cooked flavor but it was ready in about the same time it took to boil water and cook the noodles. Having achieved some level of success, replacing a quick sauce where I didn’t have a lot of control over the ingredients to a recipe where I was manipulating most pieces of it, I wanted to take the next step: start from all whole ingredients. That naturally meant replacing the canned tomatoes with whole, fresh tomatoes.

After some iteration, combining the initial steps of a Martha Stewart roasted tomato sauce along with Kenji’s slow cooked sauce recipe, I ended up with an excellent sauce that I could cook in big batches and save.

Now, I just need to recreate it…

Rememberances

I remember that I gradually moved mostly away from Martha Stewart’s recipe. Instead, I fired up the grill and roasted the tomatoes by themselves. Then I let them cool and removed the skin. I tried it with skin for the first batch and was happier on the second batch when I removed them. To me, there was a bit of a dullness to the flavor when the skin was on and removing it brightened it a bit (kind of a weird thing to say, I think, for something that ends up slow smoking eventually). I was initially worried that I would lose a bunch of the nice flavor that the roasting developed, because it was the skins that were browned, but I guess the flesh that gets browned (even though they’re roasted cut-side-down) along with the roastiness imparted in the sauce as it slow cooks, was enough to keep the nice roasted flavor. Likewise, I didn’t need to roast the garlic and onion because that too, tended to dull the flavor, I thought.

Ingredients

A whole lot of tomatoes. Seriously, it takes many pounds of tomatoes to fill up a 6-qt. dutch oven and for all this work, you better make as much as you can. For now, I’ll put a firm number and you can obviously scale.

I need to remember to come back to this to indicate how much this recipe makes

• ~13.5 lb. fresh, ripe tomatoes (in season, if possible)
• I don’t sweat the variety, though I don’t personally like San Marzano (many people swear by them, though)
• 1 huge onion (~500 grams), sliced
• 2 large carrots, roughly chopped
• 1 bulb garlic, crushed
• 1/4 C olive oil, plus more for coating tomatoes prior to roasting
• 4 T butter
• Dried or fresh oregano
• I haven’t honestly experimented with this. I’ve always used dry, I think, but we have a lot of fresh oregano right now, so I’ll use it instead. Update with results.
• Lots of fresh basil (a few fresh stems)
• Kosher salt and fresh ground pepper
• 1 T red pepper flakes
• Fish sauce
• 1T ground flax seed, optional
  • Just to hide some healthy stuff

Process

1. Fire up the grill for 2-zone cooking, 425° F on the cool side.
2. Wash, core, and slice tomatoes in half. Coat with olive oil by drizzling and tossing. Place cut-side-down in a single layer on a rimmed baking sheet.
3. Roast on cool side of the grill until skins are brown and blistered in many places (2 – 3 blisters per tomato half), about 30 minutes.
4. Remove tomatoes from grill, allow to cool until they can be handled. Remove skins. Crush by hand until pieces no larger than 1/2 inch remain. Reserve ~4C in an airtight container and place in refrigerator until step 8.
5. Manipulate grill vents to reduce temperature on the cool side to ~310° F.
6. Melt butter and olive oil in dutch oven on medium heat until the butter is melted. Add garlic and cook, stirring, until softened and fragrant but not browned, about 2 minutes. Add pepper flakes and oregano (if using dried) and cook, stirring, until fragrant, about 1 minute. Add tomatoes, carrot, onion, and basil, and stir to combine. Season lightly with salt and pepper. Bring to a simmer over high heat.
7. Cover Dutch oven with lid slightly ajar and transfer to grill. Cook, stirring once every 1 to 2 hours, until reduced by about half and darkened to a deep red, 5 to 6 hours (reduce grill temperature if the sauce is bubbling too rapidly or the browned bits begin to turn too dark).
8. Remove from grill. Add reserved tomatoes to sauce and stir to combine. Add fish sauce and ground flax seed, if using. If too acidic, add butter in portions to round out the flavor. Season generously with salt and pepper to taste.
9. Alternative to fish sauce is anchovy paste or whole, dried anchovies
10. Optionally add some parmesan to incorporate more umami flavor
11. Sugar can substitute for butter to reduce acidic character
12. Blend in batches in an upright blender or with an immersion blender.
13. Allow to cool at room temperature, transfer to airtight containers, and refrigerate for up to 1 week. Sauce can also be frozen in sealed containers for up to 6 months. To reheat, warm very gently in a saucepan, stirring until it all melts and heats through.

Modifications

• Get some honest-to-goodness ripe tomatoes, from the farmer’s market and see how this turns out
• Food mill roasted tomatoes to remove skin and seeds – both contribute to bitterness
• Only add oregano & basil at the end