The Secret Behind My Most Famous Pasta Recipe | Pasta Pomodoro

Pasta Pomodoro has been with me since the very beginning. It’s simple, soulful, and somehow still the dish I get asked about the most. In this video, I’m showing you exactly how I make it from scratch, just like I’ve done in my restaurants, and even before that, in my home kitchen.

I’ll walk you through everything: the ingredients I swear by, the techniques that make the sauce silky and rich, and some personal stories about how this dish came to be. It’s not just pasta, it’s a memory, a philosophy, and a lesson in why simplicity matters.

Whether you’re making it for the first time or trying to perfect it, I hope this helps you fall in love with the process like I have.

Let me know in the comments if you try it, and don’t forget to subscribe for more recipes and behind-the-scenes from my kitchen.

– Scott

All right, I’m Scott. We are going to make my somewhat famous pomodoro sauce. Tomato sauce that I’ve been cooking for, I mean 25, 30 years now. Without exaggeration, it’s been a long time. Fresh tomatoes. We’re going to get to that. We’re going to start with the extra-virgin olive oil. This is the seasoning. So, inside this little pot, I’m going to add some garlic. Now, cut it directly in half and put it directly inside this pot. I’m going to add some crushed red pepper here. Not a lot. Not a lot. Maybe a tablespoon. I’m going to take a bunch of fresh basil. Here we go. And I’m just going to I’m going to rip it right out part and put it inside there. I love the smell of fresh basil. It reminds me always of my grandfather’s garden. He had this huge garden that was about half an acre in size and he had a ton of fresh basil. and fennel and beans and like you name it. Zucchini and and uh pumpkins and like all kinds of stuff inside this garden. But I cannot smell basil to this day and not think of my grandfather. So, plenty of extravirgin olive oil in here as well. I want that to be kind of submerged. There we go. And I’m going to treat this the way you would treat tea. I’m going to heat this up really low temperature and just let it kind of come to a boil and all those flavors are going to start to intermingle together. I’m just going to let it sit. I’m going to bring it up to a little bit of a a simmer just till it starts to sizzle. And then I’m going to turn it off and just let it sit. And then I’m going to make the tomato sauce. And when I finish that tomato sauce, I’m going to strain this directly inside the sauce itself. And that’s where the majority of the seasoning, the flavor of the tomatoes need to shine. And the seasoning is going to come from this extra-virgin olive oil, which obviously is going to taste like this beautiful harmonious flavor of garlic, basil, and crushed red pepper, as well as that bright, lightly acidic extravirgin olive oil as well. Thing of beauty, really simple and straightforward. So, what I’m going to do, I have it on the fire here. I’m going to put it on really, really low, really low temperature. I’m going to keep an eye on it, and I’m going to let those flavors intermingle, kind of talk to each other, and uh it’s going to be really special. So, while that’s going, I will move this and I’m going to get the tomatoes over here. All right, let’s talk tomato sauce. So, these tomatoes, really fresh tomatoes. These are organic. In this case, they’re kind of like a small beef steak tomato. What I love to work with are plum tomatoes or Roma tomatoes, one or the other. Roma, if you got them. So, this is what I do. I always buy the tomatoes 3 or 4 days in advance and I never refrigerate the tomatoes. Do not refrigerate your tomatoes. Leave them at room temperature. They will ripen up and become beautiful. If you have four or 5 days, I don’t like to talk about doing things in advance because normally who has time to plan that much ahead. But if you’re going to make a tomato sauce, this is kind of one of those things you need to do if you have time. Buy the tomatoes, let them sit for 2 or 3 days, okay? 5 days if you got it. This is what I do. I peel and deseeded these tomatoes. So, what I do is I take the take the stem out and I just do a little just the skin. I don’t go too deep. So, same thing. Get rid of the stem. If there’s any impurities, I cut that out as well. I try not to go deeper than the flesh of the tomato. I don’t want to go into the seeds and the pit and all that kind of stuff. So, just scoring the tomato, taking removing the stem. This is an arduous process. We do in the restaurants three cases of this a day. So, go through a tremendous amount of tomato sauce, but it’s worth it because this is the best tomato sauce I’ve ever had in my life. Don’t tell my mother I said that cuz hers is clearly the best whenever she’s around. Love you, Mom. All right. Uh so years ago I had restaurants in a few different markets and we would go through without exaggeration almost 10,000 of these pastel pomodoro per month per restaurant has a lot of tomato sauce. So and then what we’re going to do is we’re going to take these tomatoes put them in boiled water. It doesn’t need to be salted just boiled water. And we’re going to cook them just so the skin starts to come off. And then we’re going to put them in ice water. Cool them down. And then we’re going to take the skin off. We’re going to squeeze the seeds out, strain the juice back into the tomatoes themselves. We’re going to cook these tomatoes for about 45 minutes to an hour, and then finish it with that extra-virgin olive oil that we talked about fire. The more ripe the tomato, the easier the skin comes off. If it’s less ripe the tomato, this the tomato needs to be blanched in the hot water for a little bit longer. All right, so I got this water boiling here. There’s nothing in this water. It is boiling water. It doesn’t need to be salted. Doesn’t need anything. I’m just going to put these tomatoes directly inside here. So, I do this. See this? So, I pour the tomatoes directly on here. So, it splashes less, right? Splashes a little less. All right. Good. I’m just going to let that go. I’m going to let that cook for 30 seconds, 40 seconds, a minute if it needs to. as much time as it has to cook. I’ll allow that. I always clean as I go. All right. Cleaning. Cleaning as I go. See, you start to see these tomatoes already starting the the skin is starting to come off. So, I just want to make sure that that’s happening. It’s not meant to cook the tomato as much as it’s meant to take the skin off the exterior. That’s all. In the meantime, let’s look at this extra-virgin olive oil here. You see that it’s starting to come together. And it’s I wish you could smell this because it is exactly what I want. You get the spice, you get that beautiful freshness of the basil, you get that garlic background scent, the extra-virgin olive oil really present. So, I just want that to kind of like nurture, you know, like come together. It’s a process and I and I want to allow it to be what it is. Exactly. All right. Good. So, tomatoes are coming together here. You see they’re almost they’re coming together. The more ripe tomatoes are peeled and the ones that are a little bit less ripe need a little bit more time. All right. Good. And we’ll put these directly in ice water to stop that cooking process. Like I said, we don’t want the tomato to cook. We just want to take the skin off the exterior. Let’s make believe this is a bigger bowl. And move that off to the side so that it still has a little bit of heat, but not too much. This isn’t exactly a very ripe tomato, right? That’s kind of ugly. I don’t recommend using things like this. Honestly, that’s not a great tomato. So, let’s kind of stick to these beautiful tomatoes that are nice and fresh, beautiful looking. Start to peel them and allow them to cool down. These are a little hot, but I’ve been cooking for 40 years now. My hands are desensitized. So, peeling these tomatoes. You see the reason why we do that is we want to keep as much flesh of the tomato on as possible, clearly. So, most of them come they come off pretty much by themselves. all this work, all this effort, believe me, it’s all worth it. What’s going to come out of the out of the pot, what’s going to be tossed in your pasta is really special. So, if it, you know, in the tomatoes aren’t ripe all year round. So, in the winter months when tomatoes are not great, January, February, March, there’s nothing wrong with adding a can of tomato to the fresh tomatoes, particularly if they’re looking like this. you get that fresh flavor and the canned tomato will really, you know, it it’ll really help these other tomatoes out that aren’t as ripe as the other ones. However, I’m not a fan of the citric acid and canned tomatoes. So, I don’t like to use canned tomatoes if I don’t have to. I prefer fresh tomatoes. For me, the freshness of the tomato is better, even if it’s not as ripe as a canned tomato when it’s jarred, that freshness of the tomato is still better than the citric acid that’s in the jarred tomatoes. was in the canned tomatoes. So, I always like to use fresh tomatoes for that reason. No citric acid, no additives, no sugar. It’s just the beautiful fresh flavor of the tomato itself. You got to add sugar to your tomato sauce. I think that people do it because of the citric acid inside the canned tomato. And so, you have to offset that acidity. It’s an unnatural acidity. So, they add sugar to identify that balance. If you’re using fresh tomatoes, you never have to use sugar. see how this is looking. So, so far what we see is that that garlic has no color on it yet. And we want to get it to a point where it just starts to have a little bit of color. So, we know that it needs a little bit more time here. Good. So, peeled. Now, we’re going to deseed these tomatoes. I’m going to squeeze them. Just like that. It’s uh it is we’re going to get you’re going to get sprayed. I’m just I’m just telling you. I’m just I’m just warning you. kind of stick my fingers inside here to make sure that as I squeeze them, we try not to get it to spritz all over the place, but it’s inevitably going to. So, do the best I can. There we go. You can imagine doing three cases of this thing and two or three guys working together on it. It becomes, you know, it becomes a whole thing about who who sprayed who. And what I’ll do is these seeds and the internal pit and all that kind of stuff. I’ll get rid of all that, but I’m going to strain the juice back into these tomatoes to make sure that we really maintain the texture of that tomato sauce properly. And also, you know, you want the freshness. The freshness is the key and all that. I always say this is a sum of its parts. Everything that we do here matters. And in the end, it makes a lot of sense. But as you’re going through it, you’re like, is this really necessary? Can we just add canned tomatoes and save all this time? You can, but you’re not going to end up with what we’re making. And I’ve traveled all over the world. As a matter of fact, one time I took a trip to Japan for about 10 days to Tokyo and I ate in Italian restaurants only. Among the best Italian food I’ve ever eaten in my life, believe it or not, was in Tokyo. I’ve eaten all over Italy. I’ve spent I’ve worked there. I’ve lived there. I’ve spent all kinds of time. The only place that I tasted a tomato sauce similar to mine was actually my grandparents hometown of Bento. And so it hits home this recipe for a lot of reasons. It’s kind of what I grew up on, but also I feel like it’s a little bit elevated. So, it’s still that beautiful essence and spirit of what great Italian food is, but just kind of just a notch up a little bit. You’ll see what I mean. Sometimes the stems in these tomatoes are a little rough, a little tough. I just remove them completely. No reason to use that if we think it’s going to be unpalatable. All right. All this liquid, residual liquid from the tomatoes in there. And then all this, as I said, I’m going to I’m going to strain this. So all that internal juice is reserved with the tomatoes, but the seeds are separate again discardi. So we got this little strainer here. We got this strainer. We’re just going to dump all the juices and liquid in here. We’re going to let it strain through those holes, reserving all the residual fleshy bits that didn’t work of those tomatoes and the seeds. See that? So all that liquid is coming through. And on the exterior of all those seeds, you can see the pectin in the in the uh texture of all that. And so, here we go. We have peeled seedated tomatoes here. I have a really hot pan going. It’s like on medium high. I just want that ripping hot. Peeled seated tomatoes. As I said, I have some extra-virgin olive oil. What we’re going to do is on the bottom of this pot, I’m going to add some extra-virgin olive oil to start that cooking process. Then I have a little bit of salt. I want that, you could see how that’s coming together. You could tell by the ripple in the uh in that oil that it’s really getting nice and hot. We want that to get really hot. And then I’m going to add these tomatoes to it. So I’m going to do that right now. I don’t want to I don’t want to get your thing. Ready? And so if there’s a few seeds in here, that’s fine. It’s better than having all the seeds in here. So, if couple seeds in here, let’s not beat ourselves up. It’s all good. I’m going to add some salt directly to this because salt does two things. Number one, obviously, it’s going to season this. But also, what it does is it helps break down the tomatoes and extract liquid from the fleshy bits of the tomatoes as well. So, as we go in with this very important tool and we crush these tomatoes, this is going to be the most works is actually in the process of crushing these tomatoes throughout the cooking process. So, this is a really important step cuz we we don’t want big chunks of tomatoes in sauce. We want this to be crushed with this tool. And the tomato sauce will have flexcks of tomatoes inside of it. Exactly the same size as this because we’re going to keep crushing it like that. So mixed with the liquids and the juices and the olive oil and the seasoned oil as well, seasoned with the salt. This is the foundation of what the sauce is going to become right now. And once it’s all together, cooked, you’re going to see it really comes together nicely. So, I want to take the time now, crush this like that because the more we do now, the easier it gets a little bit later. So, it’s it’s effort and I think anything worth heavy is worth working for. That’s one of my sayings. That’s my Scotty, so to speak. So, you got to work for this a little bit, but it’s going to be worth it. Trust me. All right, I’m just going to let that cook and then I’m going to clean up this mess. Now, the personalities. Oh my god. Like, I want you to taste this cuz I because when I talk about it, I want somebody who understands what I’m talking about. Yeah, it’s sweet. Anyway, it’s sweet by itself. And that like for me when you’re talking about a product like this, which as I said, those are subpar tomatoes. They’re not perfect tomatoes. But what you can do with that, even when it’s not perfect, imagine what it’s going to be like when it is perfect. Right? We’re going to cook, let that cook for a little while longer. [Music] So, one of the things that I like to do with this little device. Or sometimes I’ll use a screen or something like that. I’ll kind of go through and if I can identify some chunks that are maybe a little yellow and not super palatable, I’ll remove them. Like this one looks like it has some fibrous stuff in there. So, this is being overly particular, but I think it does make a difference. So, that’s done. You see the texture is exactly what we want it to be, right? It’s It’s chunky, but it’s also surrounded by the liquid. So, it’s a perfect texture of that sauce. So, I got this sauce. It’s completely finished. I’m going to finish this with the extra-virgin olive oil. Let me just make all this go away. That extra virgin olive oil. I wish you could smell this cuz it smells so good. Um, I’m going to strain this directly in here. And that is the seasoning for the sauce. That is it. If you want to use this inside, chop it up, whatever, that’s fine. Also, what I do with this sometimes is if I make faukatcha, I’ll chop all this stuff up and put it directly in top of the faukatcha. That way, it’s always usable scraps. Nothing is thrown away. This I’m just going to stir this around to emulsify it so it all comes together. And you see see how that sauce is not red like what you get from a can, but because these are fresh tomatoes, it has this orang-ish hue to it. which that’s how you know that they’re fresh tomatoes. Look at that. Beautiful. [Music] All right, I’m going to grate this cheese and then I’m going to chop some basil. And I got some butter here. We’re just going to [Music] So, this is what we’re going to do. We got this spaghetti that I’ve made. We have the tomato sauce finished. I’m going to add this directly to a pan. It’s on a medium heat right now. And I do this because I see all that. You see how it starts to separate and there’s a little bit of residual liquid there? I’m going to reduce that down. What’s going to happen is I’m going to concentrate the flavor of this tomato sauce. And the reason why I do it here and not in a pot is because of the surface area. It reduces quicker and it’s going to maintain its freshness in a pan like this. If I were to do it in a pot and reduce it down, it would start to kind of cook onto itself and it would become really heavy and it would lose its freshness. And there’s no reason to do all that work with the fresh tomatoes, peeling and seeding and blanching and all the stuff that you’re doing if you’re not going to maintain the freshness of the sauce itself. And that’s what we’re doing with this pan, reducing it down just like this. So, really important step. I have some extra virgin olive oil. I have some grated pano deano. I have unsalted butter. And I have fresh basil. This is the way I make pasta. You don’t have to like it, but when you taste it, you’re going to understand. Trust me, it’s worth the effort. All right, so I have the pasta. It’s in the freezer. I’m going to get it out of the freezer. The water here, this water is salted like broth. Really important to point that out. In our last video, we already talked about that. I’m always going to hit that point. It has enough salt that it tastes like broth. Really important. All right. So, while this is reducing, I have this on medium high. Medium high. At this point, I’m going to let that reduce down. This is boiling nicely. I’m going to take this frozen pasta. I’m going to put it directly in this water and I’m going to allow that to cook. [Music] Good stuff. So, I want that to I’m going to stir this because I put a lot a little more than I I would want, but I got a lot of pasta in here. I want to stir it around. So, making sure that it’s all cooking. It’s coming back to a very rapid boil again. It the temperature dropped inevitably when I put that frozen pasta in there, but you see that it’s already loosening up nicely. It’s cooking all good. All right. Again, this is reducing down nicely. You start to see that concentration. Also the concentration of flavor. The way I add the ingredients to this pan is very important because once I add cheese, it should see no more heat. But the butter, the butter is going to be added just before it’s completely finished. So add the pasta, a little extravirgin olive oil, add the fresh basil, let it cook together. As I said, cooking this pasta about 85% of the way, finishing it the rest of the way in this sauce. I’m going to add the extra-virgin olive oil, add the basil, let it cook, let those flavors kind of intermingle and have some fun together. Do a little dance and then add the butter. I’m going to let that Monte inside there all kind of emulsified nicely. And then I’m going to finish it off the heat, off the fire with the Parmesan cheese. All right, good stuff. All coming together. Good. Great. How many times have I made this pasta? They say that 10,000 hour rule is one of the things to become an expert. I would take the probably 100,000 hour rule on on this. I’ve made hundreds of thousands of this spaghetti. I don’t know how many times I’ve done it. It’s it would be too numerous to count, honestly. Pasta’s almost done. Again, another reason why we season it so it tastes like broth is for this reason right here. I’m going to drain this pasta. Some of that residual liquid I’m putting right back in the tomato sauce. There we go. [Music] Again, I’m going to let this all cook together. I’m going to add a little more tomato sauce to this. I think I feel like it’s a little a little light on the sauce. So, I’m going to add a little bit more. Good. I’m going to turn this heat up a little bit cuz I really want that to all cook together. Can you see that? See the way that there’s a little again a little bit of that residual liquid there. As I’m cooking this, that’s all going to cook out. It’s all a couple things are happening. Number one, the starch in the pasta is being released into the sauce. Simultaneously, all that residual liquid is being absorbed into the pasta itself. So there’s that thickening that’s happening and emulsification that’s happening from the starch and the liquid and the fat that we’re adding extra virgin olive oil, but also there’s that absorption of the of that liquid into the pasta, which is a really important part of making a pasta like this. Right? See, I’m not chopping it. I’m not chopping it up. I’m stirring it nicely. This is a lot of pasta. This is going to make a lot of people happy. also. So, that’s cooking away. While that’s cooking, I’m going to add the fresh basil. On a daily basis, people will walk up to me on the street and say, “Scott, best pasta, tomato sauce I’ve ever had in my life.” And I appreciate that. It’s great. People also walk up and talk about red onions. That’s a story for a different day. I get I get that a lot. Also, literally every arrest. See how that’s starting to come together? All that liquid that was there is starting to dissipate again. Really important. A little bit more. A little bit longer. [Music] Pasta is not overcooked. The pasta is not overcooked. It’s cooked perfectly. It’s coming together with that. It was It was undercooked when I put it in the pan and now it’s cooking together with the sauce. Now I’m going to add a little bit of butter to this and allow that to kind of emulsify together. Also, just wanted to cook for another moment. [Music] I was making this one time with Martha Stewart. on her show and I was, you know, doing this and she said, “Now, Scott, are you a, you know, are you one of those people that stirs the pasta or do you toss it?” And I would say, “Oh, Martha, I am definitely a tosser.” Not knowing what I had said. Anyway, she didn’t get it. Yeah, the cameraman did. And it was one of those really uncomfortable moments. Coming together nicely. I’m shutting it off. No more heat. All the cheese. Again, you want to do this and emulsify it because otherwise it’ll just become really stringy and we don’t want that to become straight. [Music] Oh my god, it’s delicious. That is it done. This is what we do. [Music] I’m going to get the right bite. Echoly. [Music] I’ve been making this pasta for for over 30 years and it still gets me right in the fields every single time I taste that pasta for the first time. Like it just make me happy. Just makes me happy. I hope that this brings as much joy to you and your family as it does to me. This is good. And the funny thing, all that butter, not a single calorie. Not a single calorie. It’s amazing. [Music] So, I apologize in advance, but this will ruin your spaghetti tomato basil experiences for the rest of your life. Guaranteed. I hope you enjoy it.