Hi, this is Easy Italian with Lisa Valastro.
I am going to show you my fresh tomato sauce that
everyone has been asking about.
So for anyone out there that thinks that making fresh tomato sauce is rocket science,
it's really not. I am going to show you today my recipe and show you how easy it is.
I can guarantee you you'll never go back to canned sauce again. I like to buy plum tomatoes, onions,
fresh basil,
salt,
pepper, garlic and olive oil.
So the simplicity of
Italian cooking is the main ingredient: the
fresh Jersey plum tomato. You want this to be the star of your show.
That is the trick to Italian cooking: few and fresh ingredients.
So let me show you how easy it is to make my fresh Italian sauce. You're gonna take your fresh plum tomatoes,
we are going to quarter them into fours.
What I have here is about 6 pounds of fresh plum tomatoes.
I'm going to use an 8-quart pot. What I'm going to add first is some
extra virgin olive oil. You want to chop up about two onions into small pieces, put
them in your sauce pot. You want to saute your onions in your olive oil for about three minutes,
just to get the juices flowing. Now that our onions are nice and caramelized, you can smell those flavors.
We are going to add our plum tomatoes, nice and easy. You don't want the oil splashing on you.
We are also going to add some fresh basil,
and a little bit of salt.
So we are gonna cook these tomatoes down till they're nice and soft on medium heat,
stirring them every 10 minutes, so always get on the bottom of that pot and
mix those tomatoes because the one thing you do not want to do is burn your sauce. Once you burn the sauce,
you might as well dump it. You can never get rid of that burnt flavor.
Now we're gonna cover our pot so the heat stays in and, remember, every 5 to 10 minutes to come give it a good stir.
Okay, so it's definitely been about 45 minutes and look how beautiful this looks! By keeping the top of our pot on,
it keeps these juices in the pot and not evaporating. It smells delicious!
Wait about five minutes till it stops to bubble, and we are going to use our stick blender. What we're gonna
do is we're gonna put the stick blender in the pot and slowly turn it on. Just be very careful.
Do not lift it up, because you don't want the hot sauce splashing all over you. We're just gonna blend it a little
bit just to get the bigger chunks out. So now that we blended our sauce,
we are going to put it through the food mill
to take all the seeds and the skin of the tomatoes out. Be very careful because you're still working with hot
tomato sauce. And by using a food mill, you could work those arms, let me tell you. The first part is gonna
look a little bit watery,
but once you start working the food mill and getting the end of the tomatoes, you'll see how much it's gonna thicken.
My kids love to help me do this. This is their favorite part of making fresh tomato sauce.
If you go in the opposite direction,
it actually takes all the big pieces off and restrains it to thicken your sauce. Don't forget to work your arms out!
I'm gonna take some cloves of garlic,
I would say about
three or four cloves.
Just to give it a good flavor.
I'm going to add again some good extra virgin olive oil,
I would say about two to three tablespoons. We are gonna put our stove on medium heat,
just the brown the garlic a little bit. So when we were younger, my mom taught us how to make fresh tomato sauce.
It was a Sunday tradition in my house.
We did it so many times that it's such a second nature to us right now.
Now that we see the garlic start to sizzle and
mmmm, all those flavors are coming together,
we will take our fresh tomato sauce that we just put through the mill and
slowly put it in the pot, cause you don't want it to splash.
Remember everything is still pretty hot. We're gonna stir this all together.
We are gonna add some pepper.
Then we are going to taste it to see if you'd like to add a little bit more salt.
A little bit of salt!
In cooking, I really don't measure. I taste and I adjust for flavor.
We're gonna actually cook this a little bit and reduce it.
Alright look at this, guys! This has now cooked for about 30 to 45 minutes. Look how nice and thick
that's become. This smell on a Sunday in my house, my husband loves it!
Add a couple of pieces of meat, a couple of meatballs, some pasta, and you got yourself a home-cooked meal.
Thanks for watching Easy Italian with Lisa Valastro. Make sure you like my video and subscribe to our page.
Now I have a lot of cooking to do for tonight!