Nothing is more Italian than pasta with tomato sauce. However, this dish is not that easy: although the preparation in the kitchen is straightforward, the problem lies in finding good tomatoes. Every cookbook refers either to sun-ripened tomatoes (preferably during the month of August), or a can of San Marzano tomatoes as a replacement when delicious tomatoes are not available. And the tomatoes that you can buy are not ment to be sun-ripened and packed with flavour. They are bred to cope with transport and to have the right colour and form, and that’s about it. And although the canned Italian tomatoes are not bad, they still remain, well, canned tomatoes. If you think all tomatoes available in Italy are far superior, then you’re in for a disappointment. Most tomatoes available in Italian supermarkets come from Dutch greenhouses. The Italian-bred, sun-drenched tomatoes are not at all easy to find, and markedly more expensive. So, what to do?
The solution is to find the best quality tomatoes that you can find, and give them a blast treatment to enhance their flavour: oven-roasting. This treatment concentrates the flavour enormously, and enhances the overal taste experience.
The resulting sauce can be used as is to dress pasta, or further enhanced by adding fresh herbs, like basil, or spiked up with some peperoncini. You can also stew some scampi in it, serve it with rabbit or swordfish, and it is excellent with cooked cannellini beans, thus creating the classic fagioli all’uccelletto.
Ingredients
- 250g cherrry tomatoes on the stalk, rinsed
- 1 clove of garlic
- pinch of dried origano
- pepper and salt
- some olive oil
- white part of +/- 3 spring onions
- a bay leaf
- some branches of fresh thyme
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