It's More Than “Toe-MAY- toe” or “Toe-MAH-toe”
Tomato season is in full swing and I've got buckets of the delicious little ovoids waiting around to be turned into sauce. But what kind of sauce am I going to make? Will it be marinara or tomato sauce? And what's the difference, anyway?
It's really pretty simple: With a bright, fresh taste, marinara is quicker and easier to make, while tomato sauce possesses a deeper, richer flavor and there is a good deal more involved in its preparation.
Let's start with the variety of tomato that makes the best sauce. You can make tomato sauces out of just about any kind of tomato, but the best “saucing” tomatoes are Romas. A variety of plum tomato, Romas have thicker fruit walls, fewer seeds, and a denser, drier, firmer texture. You can slice them up and eat them raw in a salad or on a sandwich, but they are at their very best when cooked down into a sauce.
The fad in recent years has been to call any Roma tomato a “San Marzano” tomato. You see them labeled that way in cans at the store and I even bought some “San Marzano” seedling plants at the local nursery once. And it's mostly just marketing junk. There is only one true San Marzano tomato and it is grown in the rich volcanic soil near Naples in the Campania region of Italy. Anything else is a San Marzano-style or San Marzano type. The kind you can grow in your backyard that bear the “San Marzano” name are just offshoots of the common Roma tomato that have a thinner skin and a pointier shape than the real thing. And the ones in the can used to be called “Italian-style tomatoes” until San Marzano became the marketing buzzword of choice. Oh, you can buy authentic San Marzanos in cans. Look for the “D.O.P.” seal that certifies the product has been produced in its protected designated area of origin. Anything else is a San Marzano style or type. They grow them in California and I can grow them in my garden. Are they going to taste the same as the real ones? Nope.
So, if I wanted to transform my bumper crop of Romas into tomato sauce, there a a couple of ways I could go. I could embrace my French-ness and do a sauce tomate, one of Escoffier's “mother sauces.” This one is a beast that starts with a roux and incorporates vegetables, herbs, beef or veal stock, and pork fat along with the tomatoes. And it's going to take two or three hours to make. And the result is thick, rich, and flavorful. And it's okay on spaghetti but it's lousy on pizza. Too overpoweringly “tomato-y.”
Same for tomato sauce. Traditional tomato sauce is almost like a stew in that it uses a ton of ingredients and it takes a long time to cook. And it's labor-intensive. Why do you think Italian nonne work on it for entire Sunday afternoons? You start out with a soffrito of carrots, celery, and onions – all of which you have to mince up first. You cook that up in some olive oil and then you start adding in the garlic and the oregano and the basil and the salt and pepper, and, of course, the tomatoes, which you leave whole and then crush them up by hand as you add them to the sauce. Simmer it for three hours or more until you can almost stand a spoon up in it and you've got a sauce that is thick, deeply sweet, and very rich. You can throw some pepperoncino in there to make it into an arrabiata sauce or you can add in some vodka for a – you guessed it – vodka sauce. There are lots of things you can do with a good basic tomato sauce – if you have the time and energy to make it.
My Roma bounty is going to become marinara. Four ingredients, twenty minutes or so, and it's ready to lend its bright, fresh flavor to everything from pasta dishes to pizza to a dipping sauce for mozzarella sticks. It's a flavor profile that enhances a dish with a light hint of tomato rather than overwhelming it with heavy richness.
Lots of colorful theories abound regarding the origin of marinara. All of them have something to do with the sea – mare, in Italian. Some say it was cooks aboard Neapolitan ships who came up with the sauce. Others offer that it was the wives of returning Neapolitan sailors who originally cooked it up. In any case, it's been around since shortly after Spanish explorers introduced American tomatoes to European palates in the sixteenth century. In fact, Italians were among the first to grow and consume the strange new fruit that many Europeans considered poisonous until well into the nineteenth century.
And, while we're at it, STOP MISPRONOUNCING IT!! It makes my ears bleed every time I go into a so-called “Italian” restaurant and hear people ordering “mare-uh-NARE-uh.”AAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHH! That horrible flat “a” sound is like nails on a blackboard to me. And to any Italian speaker. Italian is a lyrical language of fluid beauty. “Mare-uh-NARE-uh” is about as fluid as a clogged toilet. The thing is, Italians are impeccably polite when it comes to people massacring their native language. Most of them won't correct you for even the most egregious mispronunciations. Fortunately, my Italian heritage is tempered by a good dose of French, and those folks will rip you a new one in a heartbeat for linguistic crimes and misdemeanors. So listen up, morphological miscreants, the word is pronounced “mah-ree-NAH-rah.” And if you can roll the “r”s a little, so much the better. English is in the global minority when it comes to having long vowel sounds. The rest of the world – Italy included – does quite well without them, thank you, relying instead on the broad "a," pronounced like the "a" in "father" or "water." So it's “mah-ree-NAH-rah” not “mare-uh-NARE-uh.” Please!
Okay. Off the soapbox and back to the recipe book.
All you've got to do for a great marinara is to heat up a little olive oil and cook some minced garlic in it for about a minute – burned garlic is a very bad thing – before adding in crushed tomatoes and some fresh basil. Stir it up and season to taste with salt and maybe a tiny bit of crushed red pepper flake, then simmer it for fifteen or twenty minutes, stirring occasionally, and ecco! You've got a bright, sweet, fresh, delicious sauce all ready for your pizza or pasta dish. It's going to be a little thinner than traditional tomato sauce, but it's supposed to be. Who needs Ragu or Prego or whatever else comes in a jar, right?
Two ingredients to mention: sugar and butter. Some people have had their tastebuds ruined by excessive amounts of sugar. If you crave that sugary-sweet taste you get in some store-bought products, then add a pinch of sugar to your sauce, especially if you're making marinara. Tomato sauce has carrots in the base soffrito and they add a lot of natural sweetness. But tomatoes are already pretty sweet, so don't overdo it. And adding a small knob or pat of butter can smooth out the flavor and texture of a sauce and give it a nice glossy finish. Nice but not necessary.
Oh, and did I mention that uniquely Italian-American creation called “gravy?” You're right. I didn't. Because “gravy” doesn't exist in Italian culture. It's wholly a creation of Italian immigrants who wanted to better “fit in” to their new American homes. They saw that Americans poured meat-based gravy over their food, so these newly-minted Italian-Americans called their hearty tomato and tomato-based sauces “gravy” so they'd look and sound more American. Simple as that. Don't believe me? Go to Italy and ask for gravy on your pasta. They'll seat you in the crazy corner with the folks who ask for spaghetti and meatballs and fettuccine Alfredo.
Okay, as mentioned, I've got a gardenful of nice, fresh Roma tomatoes. And I'll be making sauce for the rest of the summer. But what will I do in, say, January? Same thing the other pros do; I'll go buy some canned tomatoes. Only a rabid purist or a complete idiot will tell you that canned tomatoes are inferior to fresh ones for making sauce. As a cook and occasional restaurateur, I can promise you that the tomatoes in the sauce you're eating at your favorite red-sauce place came out of a Number 10 can from a rack of Number 10 cans in the pantry and not from some farmers market or fairy tale garden out in back of the restaurant. Nope. Nothing whatsoever wrong with using canned tomatoes for marinara or tomato sauce. Just watch the quality. If you can score authentic D.O.P. San Marzanos, go for it. Otherwise, good tomatoes from brands like Cento are just fine. As with everything, you get what you pay for.
Now, go out there and grab some tomatoes – canned or fresh – and get saucy!
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