Here’s How To Make Jarred Tomato Sauce Taste Homemade

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In an ideal world, we would all have an endless supply of energy and motivation, but a lot of the time we just want to chill. Tomato sauce is one of the most comforting foods, whether it’s on our pizza, pasta, or eggplant parm. It’s always a toss-up whether we want to buy the jarred sauce or attempt to make our own.

Making your own isn’t as hard as it seems, it just takes way more time to simmer the fresh tomatoes. For those times when you just want to head straight to the pasta sauce aisle, you can make it as good as the homemade kind with these simple steps.

Emily Abrams

The phrase “doctor it up” basically means adding your own spin to the store-bought version of something to make it taste more authentic. Throughout the jarring process, tomato sauce might loose some of that homemade charm.

Before enhancing the sauce, you’ll want to make sure you’re picking the best jar. Make sure to look at the labels first. Try and go for one with the least amount of ingredients listed. If you can actually understand all of the ingredients, you’re in good shape. Go for some of the celebrity or restaurant brands like Lidia’s Tomato Basil, Rao’s Homemade Marinara or Mario Batali’s Arrabbiata Pasta Sauce.

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Here’s How To “Doctor Up” The Sauce:

1. Heat up a little extra virgin olive oil and sauté some garlic and onions in a saucepan. Toss around the veggies until the garlic is browned and the onions are translucent. Your jarred sauce probably has some vegetables in it, but now you’ll be able to taste the fresh ones.

2. Add spices like red pepper flakes and paprika if you want a little heat or smokiness. You can go to the farmer’s market and buy fresh basil, thyme and oregano and throw it all in the pot. No one can accuse you of using store-bought sauce if there are pieces of fresh basil tossed in there.

3. You can incorporate something sweet to bring out the natural flavors of the tomatoes and balance the acidity. If you want to stay away from regular sugar, add a little bit of honey.

4. You can make the sauce a little smoother by adding some of the leftover pasta water to the sauce or by adding a little bit of extra virgin olive oil. If you want to go all out, a little bit of butter goes a long way.

5. Let the sauce simmer. Even if you don’t have hours to simmer fresh tomatoes, 25 minutes of simmering will make a big difference. Simmering brings all of the flavors together and it’ll incorporate the fresh herbs, spices and other ingredients with the rest of the sauce.

You can play around with different types of jarred sauces like vodka, arrabbiata and marinara, to see which one is the easiest to upgrade with fresh ingredients.