Simple+Delicious Red Meat Sauce
My go to meat sauce for pasta.
Pasta is one of the easiest and most affordable dinners around. There are so many options, sauces, proteins and flavors that can come from this simple yet delicious ingredient.
Every chef, cook and home cook should have a basic red sauce on hand and ready to go at all times. Whether you need to feed the kids or feed yourselves after a long day, a quick easy red sauce will hit the spot every single time.
And while simple, this particular recipe features a bunch of little tips and tricks to elevate your red sauce.
Grating your vegetable for example is a great move. This allows for them to cook down more and when combined with our tomato paste, it creates a depth of flavor giving the impression that it’s been cooking much longer than it has. That’s why we do that step.
The carrot? That’s to balance acidity. Tomatoes come with a lot of acid and that can lead to too sharp a sauce. We want our sauce to be cozy, smooth and comforting on the way down. Not invoke heartburn by the second bite. That’s where the carrot comes in. The natural sugars in carrots help to balance the acid and leads to a more mild tomato flavor.
The celery stalk adds a savory and aromatic depth to the sauce. If you add up all of our extras together, you see a story. We are BUILDING FLAVORS. That is one of the most crucial tools in your kitchen tool belt. Great dishes BUILD flavors up over the course of the cook. By adding things in order, sauteing them and seasoning along the way, you get a more complex bite. One that hits multiple flavor notes such as sweet, savory, umami etc.
That’s the mark of a great plate of food and that’s one major thing that this simple sauce can begin to teach you.
If made correctly, you will never make red sauce your old way again.
Mangia, Mangia you animals.
Estimated Time: 45 min up to 2 hours
(If you want to saute the carrots, celery and shallot in the tomato paste for longer, it will give you a lot more flavor. Same goes for simmering. You can simmer this low and slow for awhile which will again, improve the flavor. BUT, going quickly will still result in a very flavorful sauce!)
Serves: 6-8
Tools:
Grater
Ingredients:
2 shallots
1 large carrot
1 large celery stalk
6-8 cloves of garlic
1 lb ground beef
1-2 tbsp olive oil
1 tbsp tomato paste
1 (28 oz) can diced or crushed tomatoes
1 (28 oz) can fire roasted diced tomatoes
14 oz water (fill a tomato sauce can halfway)
4 basil leaves cut into ribbons
a lotta parm
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