#vegan pasta sauce
Pasta sauce can be expensive, at least over here. It’s decidedly cheaper to make your own, and pretty easy.
If you wanna go the whole nine yards and start from scratch with whole tomatoes - awesome, but put aside an afternoon for it. I’ll post a modified version of a friends basic pasta sauce recipe in the future.
Base Ingredients
- 2 cans of tinned tomatoes
- 3 tablespoons of crushed garlic (or about twice than much chopped)
- A few tablespoons of oil
- A pinch of salt
- Half a teaspoon of brown sugar
- Water as you need it
Optional Extras
- Onion, Capsicum, Mushrooms, Greens like Spinach or Kale
- Basil, Parsley, Oregano, Thyme
- Black pepper, Paprika, Cumin
- Brewers/Nutritional yeast
- Soy sauce
The Plan
Fry the garlic (and any extra fryables) on medium heat in the bottom of a big pot, once it starts to smell good, add the tomatoes, sugar and salt (and any herbs and spices), and stir. Add water as you need to. Bring it to the boil and let it simmer till it’s soft and the flavours are all merging nicely, add water as you need it to get the thickness you like.
If you like your pasta sauce chunky, use it as it is, if you like it smooth, run it through a blender, or in a pinch force it through a sieve - this will leave some debris behind, but you can throw that in the compost. If you want to smooth out the sauce and then add chunkier vegetables, you can always put the sauce back in the pot and heat the veggies through.
Use it all in one go, or keep it in tightly sealed jars. I find soaking the jars and lids in just-boiled water is a good way to get them clean. Just use tongs to get them out.
From start to finish this should take half an hour or less.
