The Best Pasta Sauce in the World

Every woman (and almost every man) in Italy makes pasta sauce, and no two of them make it exactly the same way. All those different recipes and yet if you tasted or smelled anyone of them you would recognize it immediately. It’s pasta sauce, sugo, plain and simple.

Some add onions, others add garlic, the daring add both, almost everyone adds carrots and celery - some remove them all as soon as they have flavoured the olive oil before the tomato is added, others leave them in until the sugo is cooked. Some dice, some slice and some add them whole.

Some add the tomatoes in chunks, others add tomato paste (store bought or homemade).

Ground beef or a mixture of ground veal, beef and pork? Whole chunks of sausage or just the filling squeezed from the casing?

Some make their ragù really thick, others don’t.

Some let their sauce simmer for hours on end, while others have mastered the art of the quick sauce.

My Nonna C’s sauce is very delicate with almost no seasonings at all (left over from cooking for my grandfather who had a ‘delicate’ stomach), the onions removed from the oil before the tomatoes are added.

My dad’s is light and flavourful, and is the current favourite of all the toddlers in the family – anyone over 4 had been cut off.

Nonna Nic’s is so rich it could buy property in Manhattan and Uncle Frank’s is so spicy only a special few can handle it.

My zia calls any without meat in it sugo finto (pretend sauce).

I have a friend who made his first sauce by following Clemenza’s sauce recipe from “The Godfather”.

Allrecipes has over 140 pasta sauce recipes.

Cooks.com has 890 Italian tomato sauce recipes.

You get 2, 920, 000 hits if you google Tomato Sauce.

There is really nothing easier than perfecting a sugo recipe.

Start with a basic recipe and personalize it. Change the amounts of certain ingredients to bring out the flavours that appeal to you most. Chunky or smooth, spicy or not, let it be a reflection of you.

Use quality ingredients and take your time. Don’t cut corners.

I have never measured anything when I make mine, but I will try to break it down.

Basic Tomato Sauce or Sugo Finto 

1 onion

1 clove garlic

1 celery stalk (whole)

1 carrot (whole, peeled)

700 gr tomato paste (or 1 bottle of tomato paste)

400 ml water

1 can whole tomatoes or tomato chunks (I like the chunks myself)

1 bay leaf

salt

pepper

extra virgin olive oil

I like to dice the onions and garlic very fine and then fry them together with the carrot and celery lightly in the olive oil.

I add the tomato paste, chunks, the water and the bay leaf.

I let that cook (covered) over low heat stirring frequently until the volume of the liquid is reduced by half. (About an hour)

I season it with salt and pepper at the very end.

That’s it, basic and as my zia says, finto.

I’d tell you about my ragù, but then where’s the fun in that?

I’d love to hear your variation on this particular theme.

Whether you make it for the first time or you have perfected a recipe over years.

Share it here and we can compare notes!

Which one is the best?

It could be yours.