The Zer0 Kitchen Mains
Weeknight Tomato-Butter Pasta
Four ingredients, one pot, forty-five minutes of mostly waiting. The sauce that made a generation of cooks stop buying jarred tomato sauce.
Marcella Hazan’s tomato sauce, in the form most people actually cook it: straight into a bowl of pasta on a Tuesday. It is the best argument in this cookbook for leaving a recipe alone — three ingredients and forty minutes of low heat do something that no amount of technique does faster.
Ingredients
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One large tin. San Marzano if you are feeling serious about it.
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Halved, not chopped — you are going to fish it back out.
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Rigatoni, penne, or anything with ridges to hold the sauce.
Method
Start the sauce
Tip the tomatoes with all their juice into a saucepan. Add the butter, the halved onion, the garlic if using, and the salt. Bring to a bare simmer over medium-low heat.
5 min
Leave it alone
Simmer uncovered, stirring every 10 minutes or so and crushing the tomatoes against the side of the pan as they soften. The sauce is ready when the fat has separated into orange pools at the edges and it no longer tastes sharp.
40 min
This is the whole recipe. Rushing it is the only way to get it wrong.
Cook the pasta
Meanwhile, boil the pasta in well-salted water until a minute short of the packet time. Reserve a mugful of the cooking water before draining.
10 min
Bring it together
Fish out the onion halves and the garlic. Add the drained pasta to the sauce with a splash of the pasta water and toss hard over the heat for a minute, until the sauce clings rather than sits. Tear over the basil and serve with parmesan.
3 min
Cook's notes
- The onion is not a garnish and it is not seasoning you eat — it is there to sweeten the sauce and then leave. Squeeze it against the side of the pan before you discard it and stir what comes out back in.
- Scale this one by appetite rather than by arithmetic: at 8 servings the sauce needs a wider pan or it will take an hour to reduce.
- No ratio table appears on this page, because there is no formula worth tabulating here. A recipe only gets one when it declares
ratio_basis:.
Nutrition
Per serving, estimated.
- Calories
- 545 kcal
- Protein
- 15 g
- Carbohydrates
- 88 g
- Fat
- 16 g
- Saturated fat
- 9 g
- Sodium
- 620 mg