Marinara Sauce

My favorite jarred pasta sauce is Trader Joe's tomato and basil marinara. It's the best and so cheap! I haven't had to buy any other type of sauce in years- if I want a mushroom sauce, I add mushrooms. If I want to add meat, I add it myself. I wanted to try and make marinara sauce because it's interesting to learn what work goes into it. And... it looked really pretty on this blog.


I thought since there are so few ingredients that I better use the best tomatoes I could find so I splurged at the farmer's market.


This is how you peel tomatoes- very very easy. Slice a shallow X into the bottom of each tomato and slide them into boiling water for a few seconds. Then take them out and place them into a bowl of cold water (I know, a waste of water...). The skin will peel off super quick and easy. Unlike peeling roasted peppers... which you have to really roast thoroughly and then put under a bowl and tightly cover with saran wrap and then still peel off tiny shrivels of skin with your fingers.


Onions and garlic!

Quartered, seeded and peeled tomatoes + wine (and this is where the quality drops slightly. I don't know my wine and we only had 2 buck chuck so... that went in here) join the party. I let them cook for 2 hours after this photo and things got real mushy. If I had an immersion blender, this would've been a good time to use it, but I do not have one- so I used a potato masher and left a few chunks in there.

I had my marinara sauce with crispy slices of polenta. I got the polenta from Whole Foods. It's packaged like a sausage and I'd never had polenta so I gave this a try. I sliced it as thin as I could and fried them until crispy on the outside, soft on the inside. Coincidentally, the NY Times posted this yummy looking recipe (creamy + parmesan + sausage), which I have bookmarked for the future.

Thoughts? Well jarred sauce is much faster, this took me half a day to make although I left it alone on the stove for the last 2 hours. It tasted very different from the TJ variety, this was intensely savory (umami-y?) whereas the TJ kind is all TOMATO in your face with a hint of BASIL and rather sweet. I'll probably only make this again when I have a lot of time or a lot of tomatoes about to go bad. But an interesting learning experience...