#fresh-tomato-sauce

#fresh-tomato-sauce

La Maddalena, Sardinia, is home to the first national park of Sardinia, featuring mostly undeveloped beaches and a vibrant main town with restaurants and shops.

Italian Fiesta Pizzeria has an impressive history, serving pies for over 75 years. The Obamas are vocal about their fandom, mentioning Italian Fiesta in their memoirs and television interviews.

I use a lot of vermouth actually. Obviously it's a fortified wine and so therefore it has a lot of flavor. When I'm doing pastas, for example, I'm using white vermouth sometimes. If I'm doing a seafood pasta with clams, it's amazing. People are like, 'What's that flavor in there?'

Italian cuisine is among the most famous in the world, and for good reason. Iconic dishes like pizza and pasta are fan favorites no matter where you are in the world. And these two categories of Italian food in particular showcase the most classic Italian sauce, red sauce. Red sauce can be a stewed tomato sauce or a simple marinara sauce. While traditional recipes uphold strict standards that ban certain ingredients, an unconventional yet gourmet upgrade to Italian tomato sauces is balsamic vinegar.

This soup relies on a layering of flavor from roasting both fresh and canned tomatoes, which each have different levels of sweetness, acidity and tomato-to-water concentrations. Then, a sort of vodka sauce approach enters the picture and contributes bisque-adjacent richness and spice. To develop the recipe, I tested through dozens and dozens of different ways to make vodka sauce so I could arrive at what I think is the perfect formula for this soup.

Few low-prep dishes satisfy and delight on busy weeknights like one-pot pastas, and one of the best ingredients to take your pasta dishes to the next level is vegetable broth. Boiling dry pasta directly in vegetable broth instead of water imparts bolder flavor as the pasta soaks it up. Plus, you'll end up with a pot full of starchy cooking liquid from the boiled pasta, which can provide a solid base for building a pan sauce.

Gravy runs in my veins. Tomato gravy. The kind that starts out at 8 a.m. on a stovetop and is still gently bubbling away come 5 p.m., slippery with fat from meatballs and sausages braised to unparalleled levels of tenderness. I am only half Italian, but it is certainly the louder half, descended from uncles who pounded a dinner table to punctuate a sentence, a grandfather who made wine in his basement, and a grandmother who wielded a wooden spoon like a scalpel in the kitchen and a cudgel everywhere else.

With a bit of slow cooking, those impossibly pert, shiny tomatoes relax and soften, releasing their juices to mingle in a deeply satisfying dish. A supporting cast of bold ingredients rounds out the mix. In this skillet dinner, spiced sausage, tender broccolini spears and piquant cheese join forces with the tomatoes. For a midwinter pasta dish, it doesn't get brighter - or more satisfying - than this.