World’s Best Pasta Sauce (Marcella Hazan’s 3-Ingredient Tomato Sauce)
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It’s touted as the World’s Best Pasta Sauce recipe, yet it is so incredibly simple to make! Created by renowned food writer and chef Marcella Hazan, once you’ve made this easy, 3-ingredient tomato sauce to serve tossed with fresh pasta, you’ll never make another tomato pasta sauce recipe again!
How can you get any better than a recipe that promises to make the World’s Best Pasta Sauce? And it has only three simple ingredients.
Who is Marcella Hazan?
If you love pasta and Italian cooking, you have most likely encountered Marcella Hazan. As instrumental in introducing Italian foods to America as Julia Child was with French cuisine. Her cookbook, “Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking,” (Amazon affiliate link), is a must-have for culinary libraries.
David Sipress, writing for “The New Yorker,” says Marcella Hazan changed his life. As a self-admitted transformed “terrible cook,” he writes, “All I had to do was follow her instructions to the letter, and success was pretty much guaranteed.”
Of the cookbook, he explains, “Her recipes are consistently clear and straightforward, enabled me to overcome a lifetime of insecurity in the kitchen. She just made it all seem so easy.”
And it all began with… the sauce.
"This is the simplest of all sauces to make, and none has a purer, more irresistibly tomato taste,” Sipress writes. “I have known people to skip the pasta and eat the sauce directly out of the pot with a spoon."
A simple, 3-ingredient sauce, and 45 minutes to simmer.
Then, all you need is to add pasta or use it in place of marinara sauce in recipes like my Simple Baked Rigatoni or my Easy Italian Mac and Cheese.
Marcella Hazan’s most important rule for making her World’s Best Pasta Sauce:
Never cook a tomato sauce in a covered pan, or it will end up being "bland, steamed, weakly formulaic."
Well, there you have it. That is the secret to success with this delicious sauce, as well as your three simple ingredients!
What You Need to Make This Tomato Pasta Sauce
An uncovered pan, obviously! But also a can of whole, peeled tomatoes (they provide a better texture and tend to have a better flavor than the chopped varieties), an onion, and butter.
Butter is the secret to this delicious sauce, so you should use the best you can get, preferably European butter. And you’ll need a bit of salt to season the sauce.
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World’s Best Pasta Sauce with 3 Ingredients
Ingredients
- 28 ounces canned Italian tomatoes peeled tomatoes
- 1 medium onion peeled and halved
- 5 tablespoons butter
- pinch salt
Instructions
- Add the tomatoes, halved onion and butter into a saucepan over medium heat. Simmer for 45 minutes, uncovered, with an occasional stir.
- After 45 minutes, toss out the onion halves, season to taste with salt and pour the sauce over your favorite pasta. It really is that simple!
Notes
- Butter: I like to use unsalted butter in this recipe because then you’ll be able to control the amount of salt you want to add.
Nutritional information is only an estimate. The accuracy of the nutritional information for any recipe on this site is not guaranteed.
I have been wanting to try this for some time… I am now considering making a large jar of this for each of my co-workers for Christmas. Can this be made ahead (without regular “canning” techniques) and put in a jar as a gift? Would it be O.K. to leave out of the fridge for a few days or should it be refrigerated? I am worried about what the butter will do if chilled.
Hi Sue! That is such a creative and great idea for gifting. I’m going to add that to my list too! Unfortunately, because homemade tomato sauce isn’t made with shelf-stable preservatives, it has a shorter life in the fridge– plan on 3 to 5 days.