Steps

Adam Ragusea’s Roasted Tomato Sauce is a super simple and quick recipe to make a tomato sauce that takes no effort at all. The only thing to watch out for is burning yourself. As someone who rarely uses a kitchen towel to grasp pans, this one has burned me a couple times (literally).

1. Preheat the oven to 450 degrees (convection works better according to Adam).
2. Cut the tomatoes in half and put them on a stainless steel pan skin side up (cut side down).
3. Drizzle the tomatoes with olive oil and put them in the oven for at least 20 mins, until the tomato juices cook away.
4. In the mean time, dice up the cloves of garlic and shallots.
5. Once the tomatoes are almost done and the juices are cooked away, add the garlic and shallot and keep in the oven for another 3-5 mins.
6. Take the tomatoes out and remove the burnt skins of the tomatoes. Use a wooden spatula to mash cooked tomates to deglaze the pan.
7. At this point, I’d taste the sauce. Often I find it’s a bit too acidic at this point, so I add butter half a tablespoon at a time, usually two tbsp total, over medium low heat. Tasting is key.
8. Don’t forget to add salt and pepper.

My notes

1. This is a really good sauce, but because it’s so simple it’s important to finish the sauce with the butter, tasting it, keeping it moving, cooking it down if it needs to be cooked down.
2. The tomatoes in the oven will look almost on the edge of burnt. This is good and how you develop the sauce into something tasty.
3. When cooking the pasta, make sure you add a little pasta water to the sauce so it’ll bind to the pasta better.
4. Don’t limit yourself to plain old pasta, this is a fantastic sauce for a ravioli that’s filled with a rich filling like ricotta and mushrooms.

Footnotes

1. Adam Ragusea’s video is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhlquGe54bQ
2. He’s a super opinionated, but well reasoning youtube cook. His recipes are really straightforward to follow, but leave a lot of room for your own customization.