The Greatest Marinara
Prep
5m
Cook
25m
Total
30m
Bigly says
Folks. Marinara. The GREATEST marinara. I have to level with you — most marinara is GARBAGE. Total garbage. You go to the store, you pick up a jar, you look at the ingredients, and there's twenty-three ingredients on there, half of them you can't pronounce, half of them are MADE UP — sugar, corn syrup, 'natural flavors.' What is a natural flavor, what does that even MEAN, nobody knows, the FDA doesn't know, it's a scandal — and you pay nine dollars for it. Nine dollars. For a jar of red water with oregano dust. Sad.
A real marinara — a TREMENDOUS marinara, my marinara, the one I'm about to teach you — has FIVE ingredients. FIVE. Tomatoes, garlic, olive oil, basil, salt. That's it. That's the whole list. And it's better than anything you've ever bought in your life. Not even close. A slaughter. The Italians have known this for hundreds of years. An old Italian woman cornered me in a market in Naples once and made me promise — actually promise, hand on a tomato — to do it this way. Tough Italian men, the kind of guys who could lift a Vespa over their head, they look at a jar of 'marinara' from the grocery store and tears roll down their faces. It's a tragedy.
The real secret is the SAN MARZANO tomatoes. From the can. Real San Marzanos, with the DOP stamp. The other tomatoes are pretenders. The other tomatoes are FAKERS. Food chemists — the smartest people, they ran the numbers, they tested the acidity, the sweetness, the body — and San Marzano wins every time. Not close. San Marzano or don't bother, that's what I tell people. They listen. They always listen. Believe me.
Ingredients
- 1/4 cupextra-virgin olive oil(the good stuff, this matters)
- 6garlic cloves, thinly sliced(sliced, not minced — slices melt, mince burns)
- 28 ozcanned whole San Marzano tomatoes (DOP)(the ones with the stamp, accept no substitutes)
- 1 tspkosher salt
- 1 small handfulfresh basil leaves
- 1/4 tspred pepper flakes(optional, but only sad people skip it)
Steps
- 1
Pour the tomatoes into a bowl and crush them with your hands into rough chunks. Pick out any tough cores or stem ends.
- 2
Heat the olive oil in a wide saucepan or skillet over medium-low heat.
- 3
Add the sliced garlic and cook gently, 3-4 minutes, until the slices turn pale gold and just start to color at the edges. Do NOT let them brown.
- 4
Add red pepper flakes if using and swirl for 10 seconds.
- 5
Pour in the crushed tomatoes and all their juice. Add the salt.
- 6
Bring to a gentle simmer and cook uncovered, stirring occasionally, for 18-22 minutes, until the sauce has thickened and turned a deeper red, and the oil pools slightly at the edges.
- 7
Tear the basil leaves and stir them in off the heat. Taste and adjust salt.
- 8
Use immediately with pasta, or cool and refrigerate up to 5 days.
One more thing
That's marinara. Five ingredients. Twenty-five minutes. You will never buy a jar again. You'll walk past the pasta sauce aisle at the grocery store and you'll feel SORRY for the people standing there reading labels, trying to figure out which jar of red-tinted sugar water to buy. You'll know better. You'll have the recipe. You'll have THE GREATEST marinara, and that, my friends, is what we call winning at dinner. We do a lot of winning here at BiglyEats. It's just a fact.
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