Many of the Italian restaurants around here are hit or miss. Most of the time, they’re using their pasta baskets and pasta rethermalizers to make very bland pasta. It seems that pasta al dente is a very difficult standard to meet. Fortunately, that’s why great sauces were invented.
The best sauces are generally simple with very few ingredients. We’re fond of the tomato-based sauces because a hint of spice can easily be hidden on the back end. Every family has a pasta sauce that they love to make. Here are a few that we’ve sourced from some of the recipe sites.
This one from Allrecipes uses bell pepper, an onion, and some dried seasonings. The biggest differentiator is the brown sugar which gets dropped into the mix. You can find the recipe here.
This one from Food Network (contributed by Ina Garten) has crushed tomatoes and an onion, but this one has a bit of fresh parsley and a reasonable chianti in the mix. The chianti tastes wonderful and makes the sauce taste a bit aged.
Rachael Ray offers up at least 15 pasta sauce recipes on her own site, with the flavors varying. There are recipes with fresh garlic, broccoli, and red peppers in there. You can also find some meat recipes to spice up the mix.
There have been a number of times where we’ve wanted to have a pasta rethermalizer at home to cook our pasta. The magic is still in the sauce.
