At a glance
4 bowls
EasyOne pan, no technique to learn first.
- Prep
- 3 min
- Cook
- 25 min
- Total
- 28 min
- Serves
- 4
This is a sauce with four ingredients and one instruction, and it is better than most of what I make with twenty. The debt is obvious and worth stating: Marcella Hazan published the tomato, butter, and onion version decades ago and nobody has improved on it since.
What I have changed is only the ratio and the finish — more butter than she used, and the pasta tossed in the pan rather than sauced in a bowl.
Why the onion goes in the bin
Halved and left cut-side down in the simmering sauce, an onion gives up its sugars and its aromatics without ever contributing texture. By the end it is soft, spent, and slightly grey. Eating it adds nothing; leaving it in the pan makes a sauce that tastes sweeter and rounder than anything you can do with soffritto in the same twenty minutes.
If throwing it away offends you, chop it into a frittata the next morning.
The butter is structural
A hundred grams sounds like a lot because it is a lot. But butter is roughly eighty per cent fat and sixteen per cent water, and when it meets starchy pasta water in a hot pan it emulsifies into something that coats every tube. Cut it back to fifty and you get a thin, acidic tomato sauce that slides off the pasta and pools at the bottom of the bowl.
Two minutes short
Pasta pulled early finishes in the sauce, and while it does it releases starch into the pan and absorbs tomato instead of water. That last minute of hard tossing over heat is the only technique in the recipe, and it is the one that makes it look like restaurant food.
What else it is for
Double the sauce and freeze half. It is the base for a tray of baked pasta, the sauce for a quick shakshuka, and the thing to have on a night when the shopping list has run out.
Ingredients
Method
4 steps
Everything in one pan
Tip the tomatoes into a wide pan with the butter, the two onion halves cut-side down, and the salt. Bring it to a bare simmer.
Leave it for twenty minutes
No stirring, no lid. Crush the tomatoes against the side of the pan with a spoon two or three times as they soften. The sauce will go from thin and orange to thick and brick red.
Cook the pasta short
Salt the water properly and pull the pasta two minutes before the box says. Reserve a mug of the water.
Fish out the onion, finish in the sauce
Lift the onion halves out and discard them. Add the drained pasta to the sauce with a splash of the water and toss hard over the heat for a minute, until the sauce clings rather than pools. Parmesan, basil, done.
Cook's notes
- The onion is there to sweeten the sauce, not to be eaten. Chopping it makes a different, less interesting dish.
- 100g of butter in a sauce for four is right. It is what emulsifies with the pasta water and makes the sauce glossy.
- Whole peeled tomatoes, not chopped. Chopped tins are packed with calcium chloride, which stops them breaking down.
- Keeps
- The sauce keeps five days in the fridge and freezes well. Dress pasta only to order.
