Marcella Hazan’s Famous Tomato Sauce

Tomatoes are full on. I have been eating, canning, and drying tomatoes for the last couple of weekends. I love Marcella Hazen’s super popular tomato sauce recipe, I usually make it in the winter with tomatoes I canned in the summer. I recently saw a blogger change the original recipe using fresh tomatoes. I decided to try it!

This is one of those recipes, I know I say this all the time and I am going to say it again; that is more than a sum of it’s parts. The combination of ingredients and time sort of emulsifies and becomes silky and smooth and the fresh tomato taste stays true but there is a richness that is unique. It’s tempting to add herbs but I don’t. Sometimes simple is best. This is one of those times.

You only need 4 ingredients.

• 2 pounds of ripe tomatoes-I didn’t peel mine I just cored them and chopped them up
• 5-8 tablespoons of butter. Some recipes call for 5 others call for 8, I use the whole stick of butter baby, but you do you.
• 1 or 2 onions depending on the size, chop them up
• salt

Chop everything up and throw it all in a sauce pan and simmer it for an hour.

It will look like this after about 20 minutes.

Keep cooking it. It will look like this after about 45 minutes.

After an hour or so, when all the vegetables have completely collapsed, hit it with an immersion blender or blend it in a blender or food processor and it will be lush and smooth like this.

This makes a generous 2 quarts of sauce. I froze some and I used some to make eggplant Parmesan.

Enjoy the fresh tomatoes while we have them, but maybe put a few quarts away in the freezer for winter. Fall is right around the corner and the tomatoes will be gone.

Have a great week. I’ll see you at pickup.

Mo