When you think of chicken parm or a bowl of spaghetti you probably imagine them covered in the same tomato sauce — a blend of tomatoes and herbs plus a little olive oil garlic and maybe some basil. While you’re not entirely wrong you might be surprised to learn that not all tomato sauce is created equal. Pasta is often paired with marinara sauce which is a much quicker version of the long-cooked chunky tomato sauce you find on chicken or veal parm.
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 Mashed | 2022-10-22 01:00:00 |  249,734 Views |
The Biggest Mistakes Everyone Makes When Cooking Spaghetti
When it comes to making the perfect marinara there’s one simple mistake you should avoid: over-simmering the sauce. That’s because in this variation of red sauce fresh tomatoes are the key to producing the best flavor. While you can use canned tomatoes for this dish (and that’s actually pretty common) fresh refers to making sure that the tomatoes retain the integrity of their original flavor rather than turning them into something that’s been simmered for hours thickened and completely altered.
When cooking marinara sauce you want to preserve the integrity of the tomatoes. Therefore do not cook the sauce for longer than 20 minutes. As the tomatoes heat they will break down and the sauce will lose its moisture resulting in a thicker sauce with a different flavor. Since the flavor of marinara comes from that bright tart tomato flavor and it is meant to be on the thin side simmering it for hours will change it into something completely different.
The jury is still out on which tomatoes are best to use for sauce — canned or fresh — but there’s more consistency in flavor with canned tomatoes (you don’t have to guess whether they’re ripe or not). And because they’re often canned with added salt they have a lot of flavor right from the start of the cooking process. For something like marinara where you don’t have to spend a lot of time making it using canned tomatoes might be the better option.
