What You’re Getting Wrong When It Comes to Making Pasta Sauce, According to Lidia Bastianich

overhead shot marinara in a large pot with a wooden spoon in it
Credit: Photo: Alex Lepe; Food Styling: Ben Weiner Credit: Photo: Alex Lepe; Food Styling: Ben Weiner

Lidia Bastianich knows a thing or two about pasta. The beloved chef, cookbook author, restaurateur, and host of the Emmy award-winning show Lidia’s Kitchen has been sharing her classic Italian recipes for decades. While she typically cooks everything from scratch, she stresses that cooking doesn’t need to be fussy or overly complicated. And if you use quality ingredients, the flavors speak for themselves.

In her kitchen, you’ll always find plum tomatoes, extra virgin olive oil, and balsamic vinegar. Her secret pantry ingredient? Dried porcini mushrooms, which she says amps up the flavor of any dish. “Dried porcini mushrooms are like the Italian umami. Sometimes I put them in the spice mill. It becomes a powder, and then you add it to a sauce and it gives a lot of flavor,” Bastianich says.

Lidia's From Our Family Table to Yours: More Than 100 Recipes Made with Love for All Occasions: A Cookbook
Credit: Knopf Credit: Knopf

Her latest book, Lidia’s From Our Family Table to Yours, features a collection of over 100 family recipes, including dishes she ate as a little girl such as Crespelle (Italian crepes) with Herb Pesto. Given her expertise, we were extremely curious what she does to make the best sauce. Here’s what she had to say. (Though if you don’t have time to make your own, she has her own jarred line, Lidia’s sauce, available at retailers including Eataly, Wegmans, Price Chopper, and more.)

1. Start with San Marzano tomatoes.

San Marzano tomatoes are a variety of plum tomatoes from Naples. They’re the best because they have thin skin, a lot of pulp, not too much juice, and not too many seeds,” Bastianich says. If you can find them ripe, even better, but canned tomatoes work great. “A good marinara sauce should take no more than 20 minutes,” she adds. Simply cook the tomatoes down, season it to your liking with fresh basil, salt and pepper, garlic, extra virgin olive oil, and you’ve got a delicious marinara sauce in no time.

2. Never put your tomatoes in a blender.

Instead, squash them with your hands (or a vegetable mill if you have one). “If you put them in the blender, it incorporates a lot of air and it becomes pink. You want it nice and red,” Bastianich says.

3. Never rinse your pasta.

After you’re done cooking your pasta in salted water (without oil) to al dente, drain it but don’t rinse it. “You want the sauce to adhere to the pasta, and if you rinse the pasta, then everything slides off. And if you put oil in the cooking water, everything slides off.”

4. Match the shape to the sauce.

If you’re making a meaty Bolognese, you want something that’s going to allow the sauce to adhere to the pasta and get stuck in all those little crevices. “If you have a chunky sauce and something can go in there, I like rigatoni rigate. Rigate means it has the ridges, so it has more texture in your mouth.” For smoother, looser sauces, or even a clam sauce, she suggests going with a long noodle like spaghetti. “I love my spaghetti. I like to twirl it. I like the mouth feel of it [and how it] untwirls in your mouth.”

5. Never drown your pasta in sauce.

Bastianich sees this common mistake a lot, elaborating, “When you get a plate of pasta and it’s soupy underneath and the pasta didn’t envelop itself in the sauce, it tells me two things: Either oil has been put in when cooking the pasta or the pasta has been rinsed. And of course, the sauce is not reduced properly, and there’s too much [of it].” Instead, she suggests leaving a third of the sauce out, and dressing your pasta with just two-thirds of the sauce in a pan. This will allow the water to evaporate and the pasta to take up the sauce and finish cooking. Once that’s incorporated, if you still feel it isn’t enough, you can add more or have a little pot of sauce on the side for people to add to their liking. “What you want is [for] the pasta to be all coated with the sauce. A little sauce on the bottom, it’s okay, but not a puddle of it.”

6. Always save your pasta water.

Pasta water can help a sauce come together, so when you drain your pasta, make sure to save a cup or two. You can also keep some pasta water in the fridge to reheat leftovers. “You can use pasta water, stock, or even simple water. Reheat it, put a little bit of the water, maybe it’s missing a little bit of salt, a little bit of cheese, and bring it back up to eating. It’s good. I love reheated pasta.”

7. Turn your leftover pasta into a new dish.

If you’re still not convinced about eating that leftover pasta, turn it into a completely new dish and amp up the texture! “If you have a bowl of pasta left, put it in a pan with a little bit of olive oil and whisk two eggs. When the pasta has a nice little crunchiness, pour in the eggs and you have a frittata for breakfast the next morning.”

Further Reading

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