Pasta with a tomato sauce
- Preparation and cooking time
- Total time
- Easy
- Serves 4
Ingredients
- 3 x 400g tins of good quality chopped tomatoes
- 200 ml of extra virgin olive oil
- 6 large cloves of garlic, crushed
- 1 large red chilli, de-seeded & chopped (leave the seeds in if you like more heat)
- 250ml of white wine
- A couple of generous pinches of sugar
- 3 tsp of freshly chopped parsley
- Salt & freshly ground black pepper
- Pasta of your choice
Method
- STEP 1Pour the oil into a heavy based, non stick saucepan. Add the chopped tomatoes, white wine, garlic, sugar and chilli to the pan. Bring to the boil and continue to boil the mixture vigorously for 20 minutes, stirring from time to time. Taste and adjust the seasoning with salt and black pepper. The result is an intensely flavoured, oily tomato sauce, perfect for coating pasta.
- STEP 2Cook the pasta of your choice (this is great with spaghetti, conchiglie or farfalle).
- STEP 3Incorporate the sauce with the pasta, sprinkle the parsley over the top and serve with freshly grated parmesan cheese and a mixed salad dressed with olive oil, white wine vinegar, salt and black pepper.
- STEP 4You can jazz the basic tomato sauce up by adding one or more other ingredients such as black olives, capers, courgette, roasted peppers, more chilli (for more heat), cold water prawns, squid, scallops, tuna, pancetta or anything else that you fancy. If you do this, prepare/cook the additional ingredients in advance, add to the tomato sauce and simmer for few minutes, stirring from time to time, until everything has warmed through.
- STEP 5In my opinion, parmesan doesn't work with fish in this dish, so I normally delete the cheese if I use fish as an ingredient.