This is a marinara built on roasted tomatoes rather than simmered ones. Roasting first drives off water and concentrates the sugars, so the sauce tastes like it cooked for three hours when it took about an hour. It is deep and slightly smoky, with crisp pancetta through it and enough heat to notice. Not difficult, just not fast. It makes enough for four over a pound of pasta.
I should be straight about what this is. A traditional Neapolitan marinara is four ingredients and twenty minutes. This is not that. The pancetta and the Worcestershire push it toward the Italian-American red sauce that immigrant kitchens developed in the States, which is a real and worthwhile thing in its own right. If you want the strict version, it is tomatoes, garlic, olive oil and basil, and nothing else.
Equipment
- Enameled cast iron roasting pan or a heavy sheet pan for the tomatoes
- 5 quart round Dutch oven for building and simmering the sauce
- Two-tone XL cutting board
- Chef's knife
- Wooden spoon and a fork for crushing
Ingredients
- 2 pounds ripe plum tomatoes, halved, or 28 ounces canned whole peeled tomatoes, drained
- 1 medium onion, cut into wedges
- 6 garlic cloves, unpeeled
- 2 tablespoons olive oil
- 4 ounces pancetta, diced small
- 2 tablespoons tomato paste
- 1 teaspoon Italian seasoning
- 1/2 teaspoon red pepper flakes
- 1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
- 1 tablespoon red wine vinegar
- 1 tablespoon fresh oregano leaves
- 12 fresh basil leaves
- 2 tablespoons fresh flat-leaf parsley, chopped
- Salt, to taste
Choosing your tomatoes
Both fresh and canned work here, and which is better depends entirely on the month.
In late summer, use fresh plum tomatoes. Roasting concentrates sugar that is already in the fruit, and a ripe August tomato has plenty. Out of season, canned wins and it is not close. A canned tomato was picked ripe and processed within hours. A February supermarket tomato was picked green and ripened in transit, and no amount of roasting puts back what was never there.
If you go canned, drain them well and cut the roasting time to about 25 minutes, since most of the water has already gone.
On whether to pay for San Marzano DOP: the certification guarantees where the tomatoes were grown and which variety they are. It does not guarantee that any particular tin tastes better than a good domestic plum tomato. What I actually check is the ingredient list. It should say tomatoes and salt. If it lists added puree or concentrate, the packer is topping up thin tomatoes and you will taste it.
Method
Roast the vegetables
Mise en place. Heat the oven to 425F. Halve the tomatoes, cut the onion into wedges, and separate the garlic cloves but leave them in their skins. Dice the pancetta small and chop the parsley. Have everything ready before anything goes near heat.
Roast. Toss the tomatoes, onion and garlic with the olive oil and spread them in a single layer, tomatoes cut side up. Roast until the edges char in places and the tomatoes have collapsed, about 40 minutes. You want visible browning. That colour is the flavour you are here for, and pulling them out pale wastes the whole exercise.
Peel. Let them cool enough to handle, then slip the skins off the tomatoes. After roasting they lift away in sheets. Squeeze the garlic out of its skins and discard them. Skins left in give the finished sauce a papery texture that no amount of crushing fixes.
Build the sauce
Render the pancetta. Put the pancetta into a cold Dutch oven and bring it up over medium heat. Starting cold lets the fat render out slowly instead of seizing the meat and leaving it tough. Cook until the fat has run and the edges are crisp, then lift the pancetta out with a slotted spoon and set it aside. Leave every drop of the fat. That fat is now your cooking medium and it is the whole reason the pancetta is in this recipe.
Bloom the paste and spices. Add the tomato paste, Italian seasoning and red pepper flakes to the hot fat. Cook, stirring, until the paste darkens to a deep brick red and smells sweet rather than sharp, about two minutes. This is the step people skip. Raw tomato paste tastes tinny and stays that way through an hour of simmering; cooked paste tastes like concentrated tomato.
Add the roasted vegetables. Tip everything from the roasting pan into the pot, including any juices, and crush it roughly with a fork. Leave it coarse. This sauce should have some texture rather than the smooth finish of a French sauce tomate.
Simmer. Stir in the Worcestershire and the fresh oregano and simmer gently for 15 minutes. Oregano is the one soft herb that wants heat, so it goes in now rather than at the end. Keep it at a lazy bubble; a hard boil will scorch the tomato sugars on the bottom of the pot and the burnt taste carries through everything.
Finish
Season and finish off the heat. Take the pot off the heat. Stir in the red wine vinegar, then tear in the basil and stir through the parsley. Both go in now because heat turns delicate herbs dull and grassy. Return the pancetta last so it stays crisp instead of softening in the sauce.
Salt at the very end. Taste before you reach for the salt. Pancetta is cured, Worcestershire is salty, and canned tomatoes carry salt of their own. Between the three, this sauce often needs less than you would expect, and salt is the one thing you cannot take back out.
Getting it onto the pasta
Do not sauce the pasta on the plate. Drain the pasta a minute early, keeping a cup of the cooking water, and finish it in the pot with the sauce over low heat, adding splashes of that water until the sauce coats each strand. The starch in the water is what makes the sauce cling instead of sliding off and pooling. It takes thirty seconds and it is the difference between a good sauce and a good plate of pasta.
Variations
Meatless. Leave out the pancetta and start with 3 tablespoons of olive oil instead of 2. Worcestershire is anchovy-based, so swap it for a teaspoon of soy sauce if you need it strictly vegetarian. You lose the smoke and gain a cleaner tomato flavour, which is closer to a true marinara anyway.
Arrabbiata. Double the red pepper flakes and drop the pancetta and Worcestershire. Heat becomes the point rather than a background note.
Sausage. Brown 8 ounces of crumbled Italian sausage in place of the pancetta and leave it in the sauce rather than adding it back at the end. This turns a sauce into a meal.
Make ahead, storage and reheating
This sauce is better the next day. The roasted flavours settle and the heat from the pepper flakes rounds out.
Cool it quickly in a shallow container rather than leaving the full pot on the stove, and refrigerate within two hours. USDA guidance is 3 to 4 days in the refrigerator at 40F or below. It freezes well for 3 to 4 months, better than most sauces because there is no dairy in it to split.
Reheat gently over low heat. If you froze it, thaw in the refrigerator rather than on the counter. The pancetta will have softened by then, which is unavoidable; if it matters to you, hold some back crisp and add it fresh on reheating.
Where marinara actually comes from
Most of what gets written about marinara's origins is folklore. The two popular stories, that sailors cooked it aboard ship and that their wives cooked it as the boats came in, both circulate widely with no primary source behind either. The name comes from marina, and beyond that the record is thin.
What is documented is later and more interesting. The first Italian cookbook to include a tomato sauce was Antonio Latini's Lo Scalco alla Moderna, published in Naples in two volumes in 1692 and 1694. Latini was steward to the Spanish Viceroy's first minister, and he called his recipe salsa di pomodoro alla spagnuola, tomato sauce in the Spanish style, because tomatoes had reached Naples from Mexico by way of Spain. It was roasted tomatoes, peeled and minced with onion, hot pepper and thyme, then dressed with salt, oil and vinegar.
Two things stand out. It was a condiment for boiled meats, not a pasta sauce; tomato sauce on pasta does not appear in print until Francesco Leonardi's L'Apicio Moderno in 1790, nearly a century later. And it started with roasted tomatoes, which is worth knowing when you are standing over a sheet pan waiting for the edges to char. The oldest recorded version of this sauce and the one on this page share a first step.
The Italian-American red sauce most Americans grew up with came later still, developed by immigrant families in the late 1800s and early 1900s who had access to meat their grandparents could not afford. That is the tradition this recipe belongs to.
Nutrition estimate
Per serving, based on four servings and calculated from published values for the stated quantities: 245 calories, 18g fat, 5g saturated fat, 20mg cholesterol, 14g carbohydrate, 3g fiber, 8g sugar, 6g protein, 323mg sodium.
These are estimates, not laboratory measurements, and they will shift with the fat content of your pancetta and how much of its rendered fat you keep. The sodium figure is a floor: it totals every ingredient with a known quantity, above all the pancetta and the Worcestershire sauce, but not the salt added to taste at the end, so your actual plate runs higher than this number. Use canned tomatoes instead of fresh and sodium climbs further still, since most canned whole tomatoes carry added salt this fresh-tomato version does not.
References
- 4 Steps to Food Safety, FoodSafety.gov. The two hour rule for getting a cooked sauce into the fridge.
- Cold Food Storage Chart, FoodSafety.gov. The 3 to 4 day refrigerated storage window for cooked sauces.
Related Guides
The French treatment of the same main ingredient is Classic Mother Sauce Tomate, built on a roux and white stock and strained smooth, a different sauce entirely despite starting from tomatoes. On the same plate of pasta but from the opposite direction, no cooking at all, is How To Make Pesto Genovese. And The Five Mother Sauces is where the classical framework behind all of this is laid out.
Thanks for cooking this one. If you change something and it works better, I would like to hear about it.
Chef Alan
Cook Bolder, Serve Wiser, Eat Better
35 years of professional culinary experience and a 6-Time 4-Diamond Chef