I like to cook from scratch and I like to make my tomato-based pasta sauce (marinara
) by cooking fresh tomatoes with herbs etc. However, the cooked tomatoes are always too runny for my taste and lacking the thickness that jarred supermarket alternatives do add to the pasta.
I have tried cooking the sauce longer to get more water to evaporate but never was able to reach the "processed" level of consistency/thickness. I am familiar with other forms of thickeners, such as roux or corn starch, but I'd rather not add starch. Is there another thickening agent I could use in my home-cooked marinara sauce?
Best Answer
Fresh tomatoes are insanely watery, so you're starting at a pretty big disadvantage here. Trying to fix it with a thickening agent alone might not be the best plan.
That said, if you want a short answer: use tomato paste, whether homemade or storebought. It'll thicken and improve the flavor. Watery tomato sauce usually has watery flavor, not just watery texture, so any way you thicken besides tomato paste is likely to leave you with a thick sauce that still lacks flavor somewhat.
First off, try to make sure you're using more pasty less juicy tomatoes. It's hard to give very specific advice since this depends a lot on exactly which varieties you get. But everyday supermaket tomatoes are generally too juicy, with the plum tomatoes often (but not always) being somewhat better.
From there, the most common options leave something to be desired:
So the best option, if you're looking for a totally fresh tomato sauce might be something like:
Then since that's all a bit time-consuming, you can save time by buying paste (it's cheap and easy). If you don't have a food mill, peeling and seeding is kind of a pain if you're making larger quantities, so you might consider just chopping reasonably finely and tolerating the skin and seeds.
There's a much longer writeup, "How to Make the Best Tomato Sauce From Fresh Tomatoes", of essentially this technique with an awful lot more attention to detail at Serious Eats. I personally find the lazier versions to be a better balance of time spent and resulting sauce quality, but you might think it's worth it.