Marinara Worth Mastering - NYTimes.

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Recipe Lab

The first thing to know about marinara: its not a synonym for tomato sauce. Marinara is very specific, says Oretta Zanini de Vita, who has just published a very specific cookbook on how to pair pasta shapes with pasta sauces. Tomato sauce is a completely different thing. Its all about quick, and light, and feeling the tomatoes in your mouth, said Lidia Bastianich, who recently published her 12th book on the food of Italy, Lidias Commonsense Italian Cooking (Knopf). Real marinara sauce has the taste and juice of fresh tomato, but also a velvety texture and the rich bite of olive oil: even the best jarred sauces cant pull that off. And because it comes together from pantry ingredients before the pasta water even comes to a boil, its a recipe that home cooks should master. The trick to perfect marinara is to cook it at a vigorous simmer, so that the tomatoes are cooked through just as the sauce becomes thick. The tomato pieces hold their shape, the seeds dont have time to turn bitter, and the color stays bright red. Done right, it explains why spaghetti with tomato sauce is a dish that a person might crave virtually every day, as fundamental as bread and butter or rice and kimchi. Its a real chefs flavor, Ms. Bastianich said. It takes work to get to the simplicity. Marinara became a catchall term for tomato sauce in this country because its ingredients are all native to Campania, the area around Naples that sent so many families to the United States in the last century. Italian-American cooks treated it

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Marinara Worth Mastering - NYTimes.com

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/29/dining/marinara-worth-mastering.h...

as a multifunctional ingredient: a starting point for other sauces, the base of a soup, the acid that breaks down meat in a stew. Strictly speaking, it consists of olive oil, ripe tomatoes, a substantial hit of garlic, a nip of dried chile and dried oregano (or, in modern times, fresh basil). The list of things that do not belong in marinara is much longer: no onions, no wine, no meatballs, no anchovies, no tomato paste, no butter (as in Marcella Hazans well-loved sauce) and almost no time. Everyone thinks you have to have a grandma in the kitchen, stirring for three hours, to make your own sauce, said Frank Prisinzano, who makes four different tomato sauces at his restaurant Sauce in the East Village. Marinara, after 25 minutes, its dead. Back in the last century, when most Americans cooks had never heard of pasta (it was called macaroni), there was one kind of tomato sauce at the supermarket. It was smooth and sweet, came in a can and had a reliably faint onion flavor. Now there are hundreds. Even basic sauce goes under many different names (tomato-basil, marinara, chunky onion-tomato, rustico, classic) and can easily cost $10 a quart. Much better to buy a can of tomatoes and make your own. There is nothing wrong with a slow-cooked sugo di pomodoro, a long-simmered smooth sauce with aromatics like onion and celery. Or the quick saut of whole tomatoes, olive oil, minimal garlic and basil that produces pasta al pomodoro e basilico. Or a complex rag, which often includes red meat and can cook for many hours, until the meat melts into the sauce. But none of them is marinara, a simple combination that nonetheless requires a particular method and specific ingredients. If you usually buy jarred sauce, or think of tomato sauce as too basic to merit much attention, put Ms. Bastianichs precise recipe to the test. Use a skillet, not a saucepan. This allows the sauce to cook evenly and thicken quickly. Use fresh-tasting olive oil; it matters not whether from Italy or California or Greece. Use garlic cloves that are not sprouted or yellow, but firm and white. Once peeled, they can be thinly sliced or slivered, or left whole and lightly crushed, but not chopped or minced. The more the garlic cells are broken down, the more

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Marinara Worth Mastering - NYTimes.com

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/29/dining/marinara-worth-mastering.h...

sulfurous molecules, which produce a strong odor and flavor, are released. Using lots of garlic is a stereotype of Italian food, but the way we use it keeps the flavor under control, Ms. Bastianich said. Use fresh basil sprigs, preferably not the overgrown Jack-and-the-Beanstalk kind with floppy leaves and fibrous stems, but it will do. (The greenhouse basil available most of the year is often grassy-tasting; small leaves are tastier.) Dried oregano is traditional and can be used interchangeably; at many Italian and Greek markets, it is sold on the branch, which lends a rounder flavor than the leaves in the jar. If possible, use a small dried chile instead of flakes from a jar, which include the bitter seeds. Fish it out of the sauce and discard at the end. And now, to the tomatoes. If you happen to live near Mount Vesuvius, by all means use ripe local tomatoes. If not, canned are almost certainly your best option. Some canned tomatoes from the area around Naples, characterized by volcanic soil, plentiful sunshine and salty breezes, are certified by the European Union as San Marzano tomatoes. San Marzano is a Denominazione dOrigine Protetta, meaning that the tomatoes are grown, processed and packed there. But because the entire area of the D.O.P. is about 16,000 hectares, or 60 square miles, it cannot possibly produce the millions of cans that now bear the name San Marzano. These may be tomatoes of the San Marzano strain, but grown in New Jersey or Chile or Tunisia. This is true even if they are labeled product of Italy, which assures only that they were canned in Italy. (Unless it doesnt.) As with extra-virgin olive oil, balsamic vinegar and other prestige ingredients, both fraud and confusion are now rampant in the business of selling San Marzano tomatoes. European Union certified tomatoes can be identified by the red-andyellow sunburst on the label, but according to Mr. Prisinzano, even that doesnt assure the best flavor. This is Italy were talking about, he said. They love tomatoes more than anything. Do you really think theyre going to take the best ones, put them in a can and send them over here for us to eat? No way. Mr. Prisinzano uses a hefty proportion of domestic Redpack brand tomatoes in his sauces: he likes their predictability and tang. But to balance them with sweetness and bright flavor, twice a year he conducts a tasting of dozens of brands

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Marinara Worth Mastering - NYTimes.com

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/29/dining/marinara-worth-mastering.h...

to sniff out which part of the world, which packer, which strain is producing the best tomatoes of that particular harvest. Usually, whole tomatoes are the finest specimens, but crushed tomatoes are sometimes made from the ripest fruit. Sauce is what I do, he said. I have to get it right. It all comes out in the sauce: make marinara from a few different brands to find your favorite. The best tomatoes will be fleshy but juicy, ripe from end to end, and have the particular balance of acid and sweetness that you prefer. The explanations of why this sauce is called alla marinara of the sailor when it doesnt contain fish, are many and convoluted. It may be because this light, quick-cooking sauce is well suited to fish and shellfish. Or because fishermen had to cook dinner out on their boats in the Bay of Naples, and didnt have time or fuel to simmer a sauce for hours. Or, according to Ms. Zanini de Vita, who has just published Sauces and Shapes: Pasta the Italian Way (W. W. Norton), it could be that the Neapolitan fishermen had a trick to deepen the flavor. They would put a stone from the sea to boil in the sauce, she said. This sounded preposterous until she added, or some seaweed, which makes more sense: seaweeds and sea salt both contain natural glutamates, which produce umami, a rounded, savory flavor that makes food satisfying. Ms. Zanini de Vita and her co-author, Maureen B. Fant (an American who writes for The New York Times from Rome), agree that marinara can be paired with almost any shape of pasta, making it unusually versatile within the Italian canon. (Smooth tomato sauces, they said, work with long, thin shapes like spaghetti; chunky ones usually demand a stubby shape, with holes or cups to catch the sauce.) Strictly speaking, marinara should not be served with cheese. And finally, marinara should never be spooned on top of plain pasta, but tossed with it in a preheated serving bowl or in the cooking pot as soon as the pasta is ready. This may be the most important step of all, but American cooks often dont observe protocol, said Ms. Fant, who teaches classes in Roman cooking. You never, never leave the pasta sitting around in a colander, she said. In Italy you could go to jail for that. Recipe: Marinara Sauce

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Marinara Worth Mastering - NYTimes.com

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/29/dining/marinara-worth-mastering.h...

Recipe: Shrimp alla Marinara

Lidia Bastianich Is Taking Questions Can I put this sauce on ravioli? What will happen if I leave out the dried chile? What should I do if the sauce gets thick too soon? This week, Lidia Bastianich will discuss her marinara recipe and other tomato sauces with you, our readers. Post your questions and comments about the recipe, ingredients and technique; Ill share her answers with you on this page. And if you make the marinara sauce, be sure to tell us how it turned out by posting your results.

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