×

Home With the Lost Italian: Harvesting flavor — Red Wine Garden Tomato Sauce makes good use of abundant ingredient

Fresh garden tomato sauce tops pasta with a sprig of herbs. Michael Vosburg / Forum Photo Editor

FARGO — Last spring, my son Gio and I planted about 30 tomato plants in our garden, which have produced an abundance of beautiful garden tomatoes, with varieties including beefsteak, cannonball, early girl, lemon boy, Juliet, cherry, yellow pear and Roma.

We are up to our eyeballs in tomatoes, and this Red Wine Garden Tomato Sauce has become a weekly specialty in our home for the past month.

This slow-simmer sauce isn’t difficult to make, but it does require time and patience and is the perfect project for a weekend afternoon. Fresh tomatoes form the essence of this sauce, and if you don’t have any tomatoes of your own, I encourage you to pay a visit to any of the numerous farmers markets in the area where they are still in abundance.

This recipe can be easily doubled or tripled, and it freezes well for several months, so stock up if you can while the tomatoes are still fresh.

To create a rich flavor base, I start this sauce by making a soffritto — an Italian word for the classic combination of aromatic ingredients that includes onion, carrots and celery — which is slowly cooked in good extra-virgin olive oil until the vegetables become soft and lightly golden brown. This process takes about 20 minutes, and I also add some fresh garlic and hot pepper toward the end for additional flavor.

Once the soffritto is ready, a half cup of dry, red wine is added and cooked until the liquid is reduced by half. Garden tomatoes have a natural sweetness that I find is better balanced by red wine versus white, and the alcohol content will evaporate as the liquid reduces, making this dish friendly for all ages.

Once the wine has reduced, I add 2 pounds of tomatoes, and large tomatoes like beefsteak or cannonball should be cut into quarters, while smaller varieties like cherry or grape can be left whole or cut into halves. The skins are left on for this sauce and will naturally separate from the fruit as the tomatoes cook for about an hour over a slow simmer.

Fresh herbs like basil, thyme and oregano are added halfway through the simmering stage, and I also add a touch of tomato paste for extra richness.

As they simmer, the tomatoes will buckle into a soft mush and reduce in size by about half from when they began. Once this stage is reached, I remove any herb sprigs and puree the sauce in a blender or food processor, and then pass it through a fine mesh strainer to remove any skin and seeds.

The sauce returns to the stovetop to cook for another 30 to 60 minutes until reduced by about half again, and if you’d like to add meat to your sauce, this is the time to do it. I often brown a pound of ground Italian sausage while the tomatoes simmer, and add that once the sauce has been strained.

The entire process takes about three to four hours, and the result of all this effort is a gorgeous, refined and velvety-rich tomato sauce that I hope you, and your family, will enjoy as much as we do.

“Home With the Lost Italian” is a weekly column written by Sarah Nasello featuring recipes by her husband, Tony Nasello. The couple owned Sarello’s in Moorhead and lives in Fargo with their son, Giovanni. Readers can reach them at sarahnasello@gmail.com.

Newsletter

Today's breaking news and more in your inbox

I'm interested in (please check all that apply)
Are you a paying subscriber to the newspaper? *
   

COMMENTS

Starting at $4.62/week.

Subscribe Today