How I Learned to Build My Favorite Pasta Sauce

Spaghetti sauce, or as some people say, red sauce has one massive problem. It’s called decision fatigue. Everyone’s sauce is different in little ways, so it can be hard to know what’s required and what’s optional. This video is much more than a recipe, it’s a how-to guide on how to create your own perfectly personalized pasta sauce.

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Ingredients
28oz can crushed tomato
24oz jar tomato puree (28oz works as well)
20g tomato paste
1 white onion
2 large carrots
2 celery stalks
4-8 garlic cloves
1lb ground beef
1lb mild italian sausage
Olive oil
Salt, pepper, oregano, garlic powder, onion powder, chile flake
8oz dried pasta

00:00 – Decision Fatigue
00:30 – Equipment Needed
00:44 – The Pasta Process
01:08 – Select Your Sauce
01:41 – Pick a Tomato
02:28 – Pick Your Veggies
03:45 – Pick Your Meat
06:12 – Pick a Liquid
06:26 – Seasonings
07:01 – Secret Ingredients
08:38 – Pick Your Pasta
10:02 – Saucing Your Pasta

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Spaghetti sauce or as some people call it red sauce has one massive problem and it’s really a human psyche problem it’s called decision fatigue everybody’s sauce is a little bit different in their own little special ways and so if you’re a new cook it can be hard to decipher

What’s required and what’s optional in this video I’m going to give you the keys you need to build your own red sauce so you never have to worry again I’ll cover pretty much every decision there is to make along the way and answer every question that could come up

This is how to build your own perfect red sauce equipment wise we’ll need a cutting board a chef’s knife a dutch oven a microplane a box grater a vegetable peeler a can opener prep bowls a wooden spoon and a pot to boil pasta in the real Untold Truth About spaghetti

Sauce is that there are really only three required ingredients Tomatoes olive oil and pasta that’s it the pasta doesn’t even have to be spaghetti we almost never use it and you better believe we still call it spaghetti sauce you could literally cook canned tomatoes in olive oil with a little salt and then

Toss it in some pasta that would be super simple and delicious the first decision we’re going to need to make is to decide if we want a longer cooked deeper darker Rich sauce or a shorter cooked fresher sauce as the cook time increases the Tomato’s freshness is going to decrease but

That’s going to be replaced with these dark rich flavor notes both are amazing and once you decide that everything else becomes easier for this recipe I’m going to opt to show you a longer cook because I love that deep rich n and I usually save the shorter cooked sauces for those

Hotter months speaking of tomatoes let’s pick a route here there are so many different options but I really like whole canned San Marzano they give you a great taste and a good amount of texture my mom likes Blended tomato sauce for smoothness if you want bites of tomato

Go for diced as the chunks stayed together if you opt for puree you’re going to want to season the sauce more heavily than if you were using a can of let’s say sauce as the puree is just Blended Tomatoes while the quote unquote sauce is already seasoned I really like

Crushed canned tomatoes a lot they’ve got good textures but it’s not too Hefty this is a really fun thing to play around with as you really pick which one you like best you can’t really go wrong anyway you go for today I’ve got a good quality 28 Oz can of crushed tomatoes

And a good quality 24 o jar of Blended puree Tomatoes if you want more tomato flavor you could add tomato paste I’m going to do that as well but you could leave it out if you don’t want that like super super tomato we punch now that we’ve picked our style and our tomato

Product let’s move to the body of the sauce veggies and meat garlic will always be a requirement for me no matter what type of sauce I’m making it punches up the brighter sauces and Mellows out in the long coat sauces so it works either way onions are another thing I

Almost always include but my mother never did she didn’t like how sweet they can get carrots also helped to bring some sweetness some people place them whole into a sauce to help balance out the acidity for me I actually like to grate carrot to get that sweetness as

Well as a little bit of that vegetable body to the sauce celery also adds body and vegetable sweetness but you could totally leave it out if you don’t like it when I say body I really mean the texture and sort of weight of the sauce a sauce with more body sticks to things

More easily is a little bit thicker a sauce with less body is really watery and thin today I’m going with a combo of all three onion carrot and celery cooked in olive oil this is going to be an Italian Sofrito and it’s the base of a

Ton of dishes the Sofrito is going to be perfect for our long cooked sauce cut your veggies pretty fine if you want them to break down into a cohesive sauce and leave them larger if you want to have chunky bites I’ll peel and Grate two carrots dice about the same amount

Of celery and I will finally dice an onion as well lastly I’m going to grate my garlic using a microplane to create a paste usually anywhere from 4 to 6 to eight cloves works well for a deep rich sauce like this you could do a completely meatless sauce that’s always

Delicious the options are crazy though if you want them there’s Panetta or bacon think of like an Arata you can do ground beef pork or ve think classic American meat sauce kind of what we’re making today we got whole cuts of beef pork that sunde gravy style or sausage

In ground or link form I’ll be using ground mild Italian sausage and ground beef today super Medi and Rich and I can control the spice level that way instead of using spicy Italian sausage now that all the groundwork has been laid and we’ve got a path forward let’s move over

To the stove get your Dutch oven heating over medium high and once it’s really nice and hot add in enough oil to just coat the bottom add in one package of ground beef and one package of ground sausage then begin breaking it up with a wooden spoon usually these packages are

About 1 lb or so so aim for something around there once it’s broken down let it sit a while as the water Cooks out over medium high heat this is going to take like 5 to 10 minutes for it to even start to Brown I think people often

Underestimate how much time this really takes first the water needs to cook out and then the meat’s going to begin to fry in the fat from the olive oil and the meat itself that’s when you start to see and hear Browning once it’s brown season this with salt and pepper and

Then remove it from the pan but leave as much of the oil as you possibly can maybe a slotted spoon for this works better add in the veggies we opted for the celery onions and carrot and season this with salt and pepper this should leech out enough water to bring up any

Brown bits left on the bottom from the meat let the veggies cook down in the hot oil until softened and you just start to see the slightest bit of color if you need to you can add more oil as well add in your garlic at about this

Stage so it doesn’t burn if it goes in too early the heat that’s left in the pan can really cook the garlic a lot faster than the onions and carrots whenever I’m doing this I like to keep a little bit of water around just in case

Any of the pans starts to get a little bit too dark if you were going to use tomato paste which I’m going to do now is going to be the time because you want it to Brown with the Sofrito I’m going to add a large squeeze probably about 20

G or so mix this into the softened veggies and let it turn slightly darker tomato paste tastes pretty metallic before it’s been cooked so this removes some of that like acrid metal taste add in your crushed tomatoes as well as the tomato puree and then I like to just

Refill one of those with water shake it around to clean it and pour the water in as well this is my usual starting point for liquid when cooking a sauce add back in your meat and be sure to scrape up anything that was stuck to the bottom of

The pan any of those dark bits from earlier are going to break up and dissolve into the sauce and that is really really good flavor okay another decision time if you had wanted this to be meteor and richer you could use broth instead of water some days I just use

Tomato paste in all broth if you wanted to do sort of the like halfway in between you could do one can of tomatoes and then the rest water for seasoning let’s cover the basics before we get crazy salt pepper and oregano is always going to get you something delicious no

Matter what you’re making do you want it spicy great add chili flakes to your liking fresh herbs like basil help perfume the whole dish but don’t stand out as well in a long cooked sauce you’d notice it a lot more in a fresher sauce when it’s added near the end if you’re

Using it in this recipe I like to throw in a large fresh stock and then remove it after about half an hour at that point it’s given pretty much as much as it can for this batch I’m going to add garlic powder onion powder dried oregano

Chili flakes and a big spray of Basil along with the salt and pepper these next things are what I like to call the funk these are those secret ingredients that I’ll sometimes add that make people go like huh what’s in this this could be soy sauce just pure MSG Cajun seasoning

Sugar Harissa fish sauce vinegar think of these as like extra credit stuff that you add to make your sauce your own in special but maybe you don’t tell people about today I’m going to leave all of these out I just want to show you the pure classic American meat sauce bring

Your pot up to a simmer and then drop the heat so the pan is just burbling you could leave this uncovered over low heat while it Cooks away uncovered allows the water in the sauce to reduce a little more rapidly than if the sauce was covered neither is better it’s just up

To your time frame if you want this ready in like 45 minutes leave the heat on like a medium and let this really aggressively bubble uncovered it’s going to reduce and you’re going to end up whistling delicious if you want it to be a little bit longer cooked you could

Cover it with the lid that way less moisture gets out of it and it just is sticking around and developing and cooking over a long period of time think like an hour to two hours all you really need to know is that you should stir

This every 15 to 30 minutes just to make sure that the bottom isn’t becoming burnt for me at the hour mark I wasn’t super happy with the texture SL richness yet so I seasoned it with a little more salt and pepper and then I cooked it covered for another 30 minutes when I

Tasted it the veggies noticeably needed a little bit more time and that’s the importance of tasting your food there’s really no other way to know if this is ready and to your liking while this Cooks we can bring a pot of water up to a boil to cook the pasta what pasta is

That really it’s up to you I often opt for a rigatoni a pen or something similar to that my wife thinks rotini is Chef Boyard de but sometimes I love that this is just a thick bronze cut spaghetti which I’ll be using but it’s really okay to pick whatever you like

Here a couple of notes about cooking your pasta always aggressively season your pasta water no matter what if you don’t your dish is always going to taste under seasoned don’t put olive oil in your cooking liquid all it does is sit on top it doesn’t really do anything

You’re not getting any sort of help from it it’s not bringing any flavor and it’s just a waste of olive oil it’s going to go down the drain anyways add in your pasta and then cook it to the lowest time on the box minus a minute people

Always talk about reserving a little bit of the pasta liquid and I agree with that sort of sentiment I love keeping a little bit around usually what I like to do is take a deli container and get maybe half a cup to a cup of that pasta

Cooking water it’s got starch in it it’s seasoned and it can be helpful to like bring together a sauce if you don’t want to add just plain water to it the other thing and this will always be a fight between me and my family don’t rinse

Your pasta after it’s been cooked if you rinse it you lose any of that attached starch to the pasta that starch helps your sauce cling to it better so if you’re used to getting a plate of spaghetti with a bunch of like water on the plate that happens because it’s been

Washed and there’s no more starch and there’s just plain water and the sauce kind of like splits and you end up with a bunch of water on the bottom of your plate and nobody ever likes that and that’s from washing your pasta if you have a problem with pasta sticking in

Like large batches simply mix a little bit of your sauce with the pasta after it’s been cooked that’s going to help sort of lubricate the pasta so you don’t end up with a big like Nest that you have to split with your hands maybe add

A little olive oil and a little salt and pepper maybe some grated cheese as you like it into that mixing process you’re going to make a little bit tastier of a sauce that sticks and clings to the pasta follow these instructions and you’re going to be able to build your

Own preferred perfect red sauce for now let’s just plate this up and enjoy the beauty that is a delicious homemade red Sauce in the description I’ve linked to the blog right up of this recipe that gives you every one of those decision points if not bookmark this video and just come back to it where the chapters are they’re going to have all of those instructions for you thank you so so

Much for watching I really appreciate you being here if you need a little bit of an easier recipe that’s going to be faster check out last week’s tonkatsu recipe you’re going to love it if you need something a little bit more challenging subscribe and stick around because next week there’s going to be

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