Quick Homemade Tomato Sauce (Canned Tomatoes)

This has become my go-to sauce for homemade pizza, pasta, lasagna, and the like! Made with canned tomatoes, onion, garlic, and lots of fresh basil, it tastes incredibly fresh and comes together in just about 20 minutes. What’s more, you can easily adapt it to make a quick, creamy vodka sauce!

Last month, Memorial Day weekend’s frigid temperatures and relentless rain upended our annual camping trip with my sister’s family, sending us straight past the exit for the campsite, en route to her home instead.

So in place of heating chili and cornbread over a campfire, we baked pizzas under a roof, in the shelter of a waterproof house, a woodburning oven keeping us cozy all the while. My brother-in-law had made the pizza dough that morning, balled it up, and chilled it until we arrived.

Upon learning the pizza plan, I set to work making sauce. Without enough time to make Ina’s vodka sauce, my favorite for pizza, I turned to a faster sauce I hadn’t made in years: Marcella Hazan’s other tomato sauce. Unlike her famous one, this one calls for sautéed onions, crushed garlic, white wine, fresh parsley, and a pinch of crushed red pepper flakes. After 20 minutes of simmering, it’s done.

Friends, I had forgotten how simple and fresh tasting this miraculous little sauce is! That night, I used basil instead of parsley, cut back the oil slightly, and simmered it for 5 minutes less — what can I say, we were hungry! The pizzas, topped with this basil-scented sauce, a hodgepodge of cheeses and toppings exhumed from the fridge, and my brother-in-law’s homegrown wine cap mushrooms (delicious!) and garden greens were fabulous.

The most exciting revelation about this sauce came upon returning home when I again found myself short on time and wanting Ina’s vodka sauce. In place of the wine, I used vodka, and I added 1/2 cup of heavy cream at the end. It turned out beautifully! Delicious, homemade vodka sauce in one-third the time? I’ll take it.

Hope you love it, too.

5 More Favorite Tomato Sauces

Tomato season couldn’t arrive a second too soon, and when it does, these are the fresh sauces I make on repeat:

• Quick, Fresh Tomato-Basil Sauce (This one calls for bell peppers, too, and the combination is lovely.)
• Quick Red Enchilada Sauce (Fast, fresh, and delicious.)
• Roasted Broccoli Steaks with Roasted Tomato “Butter” (The tomato “butter” comes together in no time.)
• Pasta with Quick Cherry Tomato Sauce (A late-summer staple.)
• Marcella Hazan’s Tomato Sauce with Onion and Butter, Simplified (No tomato peeling here!)

Quick Homemade Tomato Sauce, Step by Step

First: gather your ingredients.

You need about 2 cups of diced onions and about a tablespoon of minced garlic (from two cloves).

Sauté the onions and garlic in olive oil until they are soft.

Then add white wine and simmer 2-3 minutes or until the alcohol smell dissipates.

Add a can of peeled tomatoes.

Snip them with scissors right in the pot; then simmer 15 minutes.

Add basil.

Purée with an immersion blender or transfer to a food processor or blender and purée until smooth.

Taste, and adjust seasoning with salt to taste.

This will give you about a quart of sauce. I love these deli containers for storing sauces and dressings. At this point, you can freeze the sauce for up to 3 months.

Here’s the vodka sauce variation:

Such a great feeling having homemade sauce on hand!

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