The SECRET to fresh tomato sauce with Marco Pierre White | Meet your Maestro | BBC Maestro

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Fresh, simple, and full of flavour – Marco Pierre White shares the secret to making authentic Italian tomato sauce for pasta, with ingredients and techniques that let the tomatoes shine.

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fresh tomatoes are perfect for two months within every year So how do you make a sauce which is consistently delicious 12 months a year It’s simple 50% fresh 50% tinned It’s as simple as that Now let me show you We can all chop onions but how well do we chop them I grate them And the same again grate the garlic So there we are So you may ask why do I grate the garlic Why do I grate the onions One so the water is released from immediately And by removing the water content through the cooking you remove the acidity Now let’s get started with the cooking In with the olive oil the onions and the garlic And what we do is just work it through Spread them across your pan So it speeds up the process of removing that water content There we are Move your pan Work your pans Treat a stove like a piano in the middle It’s red hot Put it out to the very edge It’s warm Push it back in It’s a little hotter But let’s not forget let the pan let the stove do the work All we’re there to do is to guide it That’s all Just move it around There we are So if you can listen you’ll hear the sizzling rather than the boiling And now I can smell the sweetness of the onion and the garlic because that water’s gone So now we pull it to the edge and we slowly cook it Just lift it off very gently so we don’t catch It’s worth investing the time As I’ve said before many times in my life perfection is lots of little things done well If you can’t fry an onion how can you make a sauce How can you make a soup How can you begin to cook It’s all about the basics It’s the foundation of cooking Questioning why you do things Why do we do them It’s all about the eating at the end of the day The next stage is add the herbs thyme and a bay leaf Work them through So now we add the tomatoes There we are Work them through the onions So you can see now the tomatoes are starting to come to the boil They’re starting to release their juices And then we taste we taste we taste Why So we understand what’s happening Acidity a little less acidity a little less a little less a little less until we get the desired flavor And that’s what makes it so special It’s not about just throwing tomatoes into a pan A bit of this a bit of that a bit of this and leave it to cook away You’ll never maximize flavor Method creates flavor So once again when you stir your tomatoes what washes up on the side bring back into the sauce Otherwise that will caramelize and stain your sauce You have to have a love affair with food If you have a love affair with food how can you create something which is delicious And that’s what happened to me as a young boy way before I walked into the kitchen I fell in love with nature I wanted to be a gamekeeper I wanted to be a riverkeeper Mother nature became my surrogate mother So by appreciating the natural beauty of mother nature and look how you hold it how you touch it how you taste her where you take her So it’s time now to add the tin tomatoes So now work the tomatoes through your tomato base Just work that through So now we bring it to the boil and to finish a [Music] cartoon really and measure it so the point goes bang on the center Most people use scissors And there’s your cartou now And same with the lid You may ask why a cartou Why do we wrap the lid in tin foil So everything within that pan stays within that pan It’s as simple as that So what you can see now the tomato sauce has just come to the simmer You can smell the sweetness of the tomatoes and you can see the richness in color and the intensity Because when you cook if you don’t put flavor in at the start it’s not going to be there at the end In the oven and that will take 1 hour at 150 Just cook it gently We don’t want reduction We want infusion of flavor intensity of flavor So we pass our sauce through a conicle strainer not a shima so it’s got some texture Just work it Push it all the way through until the pulp is dry About maximizing flavor This is your base sauce So scrape that out Then proceed again So first question would I know there was tin tomatoes in there The answer to that question is no It’s got all the intensity of fresh And why was that created very simply because of method and understanding When you make the perfect tomato sauce you want it to taste of tomatoes It’s as simple as that