Cook's Illustrated Revolutionary Recipes by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: America's Test Kitchen
Published: 2018-10-22T16:00:00+00:00

STREAMLINING MARINARA

DAVID PAZMIÑO, March/April 2006

There’s something great about a quick tomato sauce: fast, furious, and fresh. But what a quick sauce offers in convenience it lacks in the complexity of a slowly simmered tomato sauce, the best known of which may be marinara.

Unfortunately, complexity of flavor means lots of time in the kitchen, which is in short supply on a Tuesday night. My goal was to produce a multidimensional sauce in less than an hour, starting the clock the moment I entered the kitchen and stopping it when dinner was on the table. Weeding through hundreds of marinara recipes, I settled on testing not only a variety of “quick” versions but also some that were cooked for longer than an hour. The differences were readily apparent. The quick sauces were generally thin and lacked depth of flavor. The long-cooked sauces got the complexity right, but most relied on an ambitious laundry list of ingredients to achieve it—not to mention a lot of time. The sauce I was after had to capture some of these robust flavors within the confines of fairly quick cooking.

A TRICK WITH TOMATOES

Because prime fresh tomatoes are available for such a limited time during the year, I opted for canned. But which variety should I choose?

Crushed, pureed, and diced tomatoes offered the ultimate ease in sauce making: Open can, dump contents into pan. But all three options have downsides. Pureed tomatoes go into the can already cooked, which imparts a stale, flat flavor to the final sauce. Crushed tomatoes are generally packed in tomato puree: same problem. With these, my sauces came out tasting like unremarkable homemade versions of the jarred spaghetti sauces sold at the supermarket. With canned diced tomatoes, the problem was texture, not flavor. In the past, we’ve learned that manufacturers treat diced tomatoes with calcium chloride to keep them from turning to mush and losing their shape. That’s fine for many dishes, but for recipes in which a smooth consistency is desired, calcium chloride does its job too well, making the tomatoes harder to break down—and the resulting sauces oddly granular.

The only choice left, then, was canned whole tomatoes. (While whole tomatoes are also treated with calcium chloride, the chemical has direct contact with a much smaller percentage of the tomato.) The big drawback of using whole tomatoes in a sauce is that they have to be cut up. Chopping them on a cutting board was a mess. The solution was to dump the tomatoes into a strainer over a bowl and then hand-crush them, removing the hard core and any stray bits of skin.

That’s when I made the first of several decisions that would enable me to get long-simmered complexity in a short time. Most marinara recipes call for simply adding a can (or two) of tomatoes to the pot, juice and all—and some even call for throwing in a can of water. Now that I was separating the solids from the juice anyway, why not experiment with adding less of the

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