All Day Marinara

For some reason, this is one of those recipes that seems to shock people: "You make your own pasta sauce?"  Maybe it's something to do with our generation growing up with jars of sauce readily (and cheaply) available at the grocery store.  Don't get me wrong, I love a good jar of pasta sauce, but they don't quite compare to a sauce made simply with fresh ingredients.  The house smells wonderful, and if you cook in large quantities you can freeze it and pull a package out on any night of the week for a taste of summer.  My recipe is for a simple marinara--only four main ingredients--but a slow, all day cooking renders the flavors very intense and totally unlike anything that comes out of a jar.

However, that "all day" qualifier can make this recipe a bit of an endurance test.  Because I make it in vast quantities with fresh ingredients, this sauce requires a LOT of peeling and chopping.  Since we moved to Chicago, we have lived a few blocks from the Maxwell Street Market, where every Sunday I can buy tomatoes for 2 pounds per dollar.  So in the summer I buy a big box of tomatoes on the cheap and make a vat of sauce.  It is often my go-to recipe for Sunday company, especially as the last half of the cooking is largely unattended.  Yesterday I got ambitious and bought a 20 lb box of tomatoes.  I should have known by the sweat dripping down my face after carrying it home that I was getting myself into a huge ordeal.  I will present the recipe for my usual amount, as 20 lbs is somewhat suicidal, though this would of course work on a smaller proportionate scale.  Though usually not my motto, here I think I have managed to keep it simple, stupid, with delicious results.

Ingredients

• 10 lbs tomatoes, peeled and roughly diced
  (Roma tomatoes are supposed to be the best as they have the least liquid, but they also take forever to peel since they are small. We're going to cook them into submission anyway, so any variety should be fine)
• the cloves from an entire head of garlic, sliced into thin slivers
• a glassful of red wine
  (whatever kind you will be happy to drink the rest of, though perhaps nothing overly sweet)
• 1 large bunch of basil leaves, roughly chopped
  
• salt and pepper
• olive oil

Directions

1.  Chop the garlic.  My mom taught me an easy way to remove the skins, in case you don't know it:  Place a clove on the cutting board and lay the flat side of a knife on top of it.  Hit it with the palm of your hand, and the papery skin should peel right off.  Pour enough olive oil into a large stock pot to just cover the bottom.  Turn the heat onto its lowest setting and add the garlic.  You want the garlic to soften in the warm oil but not brown. 

It will get very fragrant.  Move it around a little once in a while to make sure it isn't sticking.  Cook the garlic for about 30 minutes, when it should be almost starting to darken.  That is your cue to start adding tomatoes.

2.  Usually I start peeling and chopping the tomatoes while the garlic cooks.  If you don't remove the peel, it rolls up into tough little sticks during cooking, which can get stuck in your teeth and generally annoy me to no end.  It's up to you if you want to leave them in, but now that I bought a tomato peeler, I feel that I have no excuse.  The only other way I knew how to peel tomatoes was to plunge them in boiling water for a minute and then shrug the shriveled skin off.  Not only is this method tedious, but I always burned my fingers to hell.  I highly recommend investing in a peeler.  Anyway, you'll want to add the tomatoes to the pot before the garlic gets brown.  If you haven't finished peeling and chopping all the tomatoes yet, just throw in what you have done and continue adding tomatoes as you chop them.  This may take you a while, but do not lose heart.  Turn the heat up so that the tomatoes begin to boil.

3.  Keep stirring, and once all the tomatoes have been added let out a sigh of relief.  If you used watery tomatoes, you may notice quite a bit of liquid floating at the top.  Feel free to skim some of this off.  You need some liquid to cook the tomatoes in, and it will thicken over time.  But we don't want the end result to be really watery, so if it seems particularly soupy at this point, drain a little off.  Add the wine and salt and pepper to taste.

4.  Turn down the heat and allow the sauce to simmer uncovered for about 2 hours, or longer if you have time.  You want it to bubble enough so that the excess liquid is evaporating, but not so much that it is splattering all over your kitchen.  Stir every 10-15 minutes or so to make sure that nothing is burning to the bottom of the pan.  The tomatoes should eventually lose their shape and turn into a delicious red sludge.

5.  About 10 minutes before serving (say when you start cooking the pasta), add the basil.  Basil is fragile and easily overcooks, so only put it in at the end.  It should still have plenty of time to get the sauce wonderfully flavorful.  Taste again and add salt or pepper as your heart desires.  The sauce has been boiling for hours, so be careful when you go to eat it!