The recipe for mouth-watering tomato and basil pasta

Pasta with tomato sauce is one of the recipes that best represents the Italian culinary tradition: here’s how to prepare it to perfection.

Let’s start from a fundamental assumption: the real recipe for pasta with tomato sauce does not exist. You got it right, the highest institution of Italian cuisine, the dish symbol of our culinary tradition, cannot be prepared in a single and perfect form. Starting with the type of pasta, which certainly sees spaghetti among the favourites, but which play with penne, macaroni, mezze Maniche and so on and so forth; passing through the gravy, which can be prepared with different tipi of tomato, and again, with fresh tomatoes, peeled, reduced to pulp or sauce.

Those who love cooking also know another thing well: that pasta with tomato sauce is not a simple dish. Immediately banish from your mind the memories of the university, when during periods of intense study it was warmed up past in a saucepan and then the pasta was dipped in it (and maybe even eaten from the pot!).

Pasta with tomato sauce, precisely because it is a dish made with just a few basic ingredients, is among the most difficult to balance, and the result is anything but obvious. There are so many versions different of this dish, but we have tried to stay as close to tradition as possible, using spaghetti and San Marzano tomatoes, sweet, fleshy and low in water.

Pasta, tomato and basil: are you ready to balance these three elements perfection to give life to the most iconic dish of the Italian tradition? So let’s start right away: here is the recipe for spaghetti with tomato and basil!

How to make pasta with tomato sauce: the recipe

1. Let’s see immediately how to make the sauce, simple not only in appearance thanks to the use of peeled tomatoes. Take a frying pan and put a generous layer of oil with the peeled and tested garlic.
2. Let the garlic brown and then add the peeled tomatoes.
3. Lower the heat under the pan, add salt and cover with a lid, leaving the tomatoes to cook for about 50-60 minutes.
4. Once the time has passed, remove the garlic and pass the tomatoes through a vegetable mill, in order to obtain a smooth tomato sauce without pieces (if you want, you can do this step more than once to be sure you don’t find any pieces).
5. Put the pureed sauce back in the pan with a drizzle of oil and continue cooking for another 10-15 minutesadding a few basil leaves to taste (washed and dried carefully).
6. Meanwhile, boil the water for the pasta in a large saucepan.
7. Once the pasta is cooked, drain it al dente and put it in the saucepan with the sauce on the heat. Give a further round of oil, finally add a ladle of cooking water jumbled up good spaghetti with fresh tomato sauce.
8. Once you have concluded this sentence, you will be ready to serve. Serve hot pasta with fresh basil leaves, a drizzle of oil a raw and a grating of black pepper.
9. Your spaghetti with tomato and basil are finally ready: Enjoy your meal!

Another classic pasta format to use for this preparation are pennette with tomato sauce, but also linguine or tagliolini. If you liked this easy first course, we also leave you many quick and easy recipes easy to do to surprise all your guests and our quick first courses favorites!

Pasta with fresh tomato sauce: the variant and suggestions for flavoring the first course

If you have good tomatoes suitable for preparing a sauce, such as the classic San Marzano, you can also try preparing this tomato pasta recipe starting from the fresh vegetables. To make it easier to remove the skin, we recommend blanching them in hot water for about 10-15 minutes, remove the skin as much as possible along with the seeds and then continue with the previous recipe without skipping any steps (it would be good to be safe pass once more all in a vegetable puree so as to have a nice smooth sauce).

You can also enrich your pasta with simple sauce, for example by preparing a nice pan-fried onion before cooking add the sauce (once it’s quite ready) and you won’t have to use anything other than your favorite quality of onion: we, for example, are crazy about red onion, nor we chop half with a knife And that’s it.

Spices and aromatic herbs must not be missing: not only basil but also a bit of crushed pepper it can be right for you and give that extra boost to the dish. To complete the first one, a generous grating of cheese such as Grana Padano or Parmigiano Reggiano is never bad. A little secret? If the tomato sauce is too acidic just add a pinch of sugar.

Tomato pasta: calories

If you follow a light diet, surely this is a dish that can easily find space on your menu, perhaps eaten for lunch, given the amount of carbohydrates some pasta. But how many calories does a plate of pasta with sauce have? Usually a portion, if we take into account approx 80 g of pastais around 400 calories, considering more or less 300 for pasta and another 100 for all the condiments.

For other great classics of our cuisine, here are all our recipes with tomatoes for you!

storage

Pasta with tomato sauce is, for many, a religion. It should be enjoyed steaming hot and just ready to be able to appreciate it 100%. For this reason we absolutely advise against keeping it in the fridge. If you want, you can keep your sauce separately in an airtight container, in the fridge for 3-4 days.

What do you think? If you liked it, here are many other ideas for cheap first courses!

Reserved reproduction © 2023 – PC