Marinara Sauce

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I looked at several recipes for marinara sauce and found most had the same base, using whole peeled tomatoes and olive oil. The nice thing about this is that this is your own homemade sauce, you can make it exactly as you like it!

Garlic and seasonings can be added to your taste. One trick if you like the flavor of onion, but don't care for the texture it gives marinara sauce, is to add half of an onion to the sauce while it cooks, skipping the mashing step and removing it before serving.

My wife and I like chunky sauce, so we add more ingredients than most of the recipes out there. For our take on the sauce, we add mushrooms and Italian seasonings, but no salt. 

All the beautiful ingredients!

Ingredients

• 28 oz can of Whole Peeled Tomatoes
  
• 2 tablespoons Olive Oil
• Whole small/medium Onion, rough chopped (or less to your liking)
• Whole Bulb of Garlic, peeled (or less to your liking)
• Mushrooms (as much as needed to your liking)
•  1 teaspoon Italian Seasoning (or any mix of oregano, basil, rosemary, etc. to your liking)
•  ½ teaspoon Red Pepper Flakes (or to your liking)
•  Salt (to taste, if needed)
  

Directions

1 - Pour all ingredients into a small sauce pan.

Pour everything into a small sauce pan

2 - Stir them gently to fully mix, taking care not to break the tomatoes.

Stir everything together

3 - Bring to a simmer over medium/high heat, stirring occasionally.

4 - Lower the temperature, cover with a lid, and let it simmer for 20 minutes.

5 - Mash all the ingredients together, using a potato masher, or other hard utensil, then stir together. This should break up the tomatoes and garlic to start forming the sauce.

Mash it all together after it's simmered a while

6 - Let it simmer, covered, for another 30 mins. Stir occasionally.

7 - Mash the ingredients once more to break apart the onion and anything else that’s still in larger chunks, then stir together.

8 - Let simmer, covered, for another 10-15 mins or so, stirring occasionally.
You may need to mash several more times every 5 mins or so while it's simmering it's final minutes.

Awesome Sauce!

9 - It is pretty much done at this point. You can remove it from heat and set it aside. We will now go back to our pizza dough.

If you want the sauce less chunky, you can run it through a blender before using.

You will have a lot of leftover sauce if you’re only making one pizza. There is usually enough left over to save for a nice pasta dish for a future dinner. Keep that in mind if you plan to blend it smoother for pizza use, you may want to set some aside for pasta or other uses. It makes great bread stick dipping sauce too!