even better tomato butter sauce
The aggressive simplicity of this sauce taught me a lot about what “Italian cooking” really is. It has surprisingly little to do with the cuisine and everything to do with the attitude: a belief that a few simple ingredients of the highest quality, treated in a way that lets their original whatever-ness shine, is more than enough to create something significant.
This sauce is so significant in the Italian gospel it inspires countless Food Blog Elites and wannabes like myself to rewrite more overwrought content about it, which is entirely missing the point. So I’ll get right to it.
It’s still That Sauce. There are no compromises in integrity here. Just one small, simple change: instead of 100% whole plum San Marzano tomatoes, half the tomatoes are tinned cherry tomatoes, genius items available on the Italian internet that are basically just incredibly sweet fat little perfect spheres of summer tomato season in an easy-pop can. You say tomato, I say … also tomato because it’s the exact same food in a different shape, yet there’s just something about the two flavors together that is extra special, extra bright, extra sweet. And when you’re starting with a 4 ingredient sauce, making it 5 is absolutely definition extra, or the maximum amount of excitement at my current life stage my brain can handle without blowing a fuse.
So how then is this sauce so enduringly popular despite its borecore ingredient list and total unwillingness to be customized? Tomatoes and butter and an old ass onion from a drawer and some salt are exactly as humble as they sound like they are, and yet mixed in the right way, are beyond any of those things alone. Alchemical transmutation assumes equivalent exchange; when I apply that to the theory of my current boring life, I remember: sure, you can’t make something out of nothing, but you can always take something simple and transform it into something incredible with science, skill, and just the tiniest bit of magic.
Recipe
Hard to beat for a reason. This very slight twist on Marcela Hazan’s classic 3-ingredient tomato butter sauce uses canned cherry tomatoes for an exceptionally sweet sauce that’s blended with an immersion blender for a velvety smooth finish.
Effortful time: 5 minutes
Total time: 1 hour
Serves: 3-4
You need
1 large yellow onion, peeled and cut in half
14 oz can whole San Marzano tomatoes
14 oz can cherry tomatoes from Italy
4 tbsp butter
1/2 tsp salt
12 oz pasta, dealer’s choice (not included in the 5 ingredients)
Parm for serving
Make it
Build the sauce. Put the onion halves, contents of both tomato cans, butter, and salt in a saucepan.
Simmer the sauce. Heat at medium until it starts to sputter, maybe 5 minutes, and then drop to very low.
Cook pasta. After 35 minutes, heat water for pasta. Cook it. This brings you to about 55 minutes.
Finish and blend the sauce if desired. 5 minutes before the pasta is done, remove the sauce from the heat. Fish out the onions. Hit it with a stick blender. Or don’t: as of this posting on 01/12/20, it’s still a free country.
Toss with pasta. Remove the pasta from water with tongs and throw it right into the sauce. Turn burner to low. Cook and detangle for 1 minute to finish the pasta.
Serve it up. Serve with grated parm and an Italian Dinner Party playlist featuring songs from the album Italian Dinner Music.