Great ingredients and a long stay in a low oven are the keys to the best Italian-American red sauce.
Starting with good quality tomatoes and crushing them by hand offers great flavor and texture later on.
This is red sauce. The slow-cooked, rib-sticking Italian-American stew designed to fill you up with equal parts flavor and pride. It's the kind of sauce for which you open up the windows while you're cooking just to make sure that everyone else in the neighborhood knows what you're up to. It's the kind of sauce kids defend the honor of in grade school.
At the supermarket, you'll see canned tomatoes in a variety of forms—crushed, diced, in sauce, etc—but what you're looking for are whole peeled plum tomatoes packed in juice or puree. While it'sto find a decent can of crushed tomatoes, the tomatoes packed whole are almost invariably better quality than those used for crushed or diced tomatoes, and they give you more freedom to chop them to whatever size you'd like.
Oil also allows you to cook at higher temperatures and is less volatile than, say, water. Many chemical reactions that create flavor don't occur under the 212°F boiling point of water. Oil is an edible medium which can be heated well above this temperature. Finally, fat adds flavor and texture of its own. Some folks will tell you that you should never cook with extra-virgin olive oil, as it ruins its flavor. Poppycock!of its flavors will break down.
I tried a number of iterations using fresh and dried versions of each in various combinations. I ended up settling on a mix of dried oregano and fresh basil leaves and stems.in their dried forms—like papery, bland shadows of themselves. Oregano, on the other hand, fares just fine. The flavor is a little different from fresh oregano, but it's intense and herbal in its own way, and for my money, is an indispensable element of a good Italian-American red sauce.
Along with the oregano, I also add a big pinch of red pepper flakes. A touch of heat brings out all the other flavors in the sauce.
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