Your Own Brand of Spaghetti Sauce

About author / Pamela Chester

Mom of two; graduate French Culinary Institute; kids cooking program instructor; Master's degree in food studies. Creates kid friendly foods and loves her slow cooker.

Being of partial Italian descent, one of my dietary staples is pasta with red tomato sauce. I have had this meal for dinner about once a week for almost as long as I can remember. Unlike a lot of my friends, I have zero recollection of eating pasta with jarred tomato sauce while growing up. Although my mother always worked a full time job, one of her priorities was to have a family meal together around the table every night. But when pasta night came this didn’t mean that she grabbed a jar of Ragu, which she openly criticized.

Pasta night usually meant a long simmered, rich homemade spaghetti sauce, and not called “gravy” as you will sometimes hear. My mom learned how to make basic Italian tomato sauce from her Italian father, and in turn passed her sauce making techniques on to us kids. I know that she put her own spin on it because my pop pop’s sauce was generally a bit sweeter. He cooked his sauce all day (at least when I knew him and he was retired) and often included pieces of chicken, pork, and sweet and hot sausage, making it more of a Cacciatore style sauce.

My mom’s version was a bit simpler. It began with garlic cooked in olive oil along with a mix of sweet and hot Italian sausage, a specific brand of crushed plum tomatoes. It was seasoned with dry herbs (never Italian seasoning, but a customized mix of basil, oregano, and red chili flakes), and just a few grains of sugar, then cooked for about an hour. My own sauce is quite similar, although sometimes I will add a little wine while it is cooking, and a lot of times I omit the meat.

Growing up with such great Southern Italian home cooking makes it hard for me to ever want to go out to a traditional Italian American restaurant. Restaurants that offer regional Italian food are a different story, but I rarely jump at the chance to go to the typical Little Italy style restaurant. But an even greater obstacle for me is to pay for a jar of sauce when I know that the real magic only happens when you simmer the sauce yourself.

So when my sister was over last week and peeked in the fridge, she was taken aback when she saw a dreaded jar of sauce. Since we had been trained from such a young age not to accept jarred sauce she made a little joke about it. The truth is that it was my husband’s (*I will admit, however that I sometimes used the jarred stuff back when I was in college).

He often cooks up a quick dinner with it when I am out of town or not home. But it got me thinking— how could we prevent such a kitchen “travesty” from happening in the future? One way is to slow cook a large batch of sauce in the crockpot. You can enjoy some of the sauce after it has been cooking all day, served with a little freshly grated Parmesan cheese over pasta, and freeze the remaining sauce in portions in ziplock bags for future meals. Below is my old family favorite pasta sauce recipe, adapted to cook in the slow cooker. Mangia Mangia!

Serves/Makes: 8

• 1 pound lean ground beef or turkey
• 4 cans (14.5 ounce size) diced tomatoes, undrained
• 6 cans (6 ounce size) tomato paste
• 1 cup beef broth
• 1/4 cup packed brown sugar
• 1 tablespoon dried marjoram
• 2 tablespoons garlic powder
• 2 teaspoons dried basil
• 2 teaspoons dried oregano
• 2 tablespoons minced fresh parsley
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 bay leaf
• cooked pasta