Fresh Tomato Sauce By Mary Contini
The best cooking tomatoes come from Naples. This is a fact of life! Very soft, ripe San Marzano
plum tomatoes cook down in no time, producing a full-flavoured, juicy, wonderful sugo. This
sugo, served with spaghettini, encapsulates all I love about tomatoes – sweet, perfumed and delicate.
Ingredients:
750 g ripe sweet tomatoes, preferably San
Marzano, skinned
3–4 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
2 cloves of garlic, peeled
Maldon sea salt
a handful of fresh basil leaves, torn
360 g spaghettini
freshly ground black pepper
Cut the tomatoes into even-sized pieces. If you are lucky enough to find ripe, sweet, San
Marzano plum tomatoes, then simply skin them and cut them into quarters lengthways.
Put the tomatoes into a large flat frying pan. Pour over the extra-virgin olive oil. Slice the
garlic thinly on to the tomatoes. (This way the garlic cooks very gently and imparts a more
delicate flavour than if cooked in oil first. The slivers are easily left on the plate when eating.)
Cook the tomatoes over a low heat until they soften and collapse. Move them around from
time to time; they’ll take about 15 minutes. Add Maldon salt to bring out all the sweetness and
flavour of the tomatoes. Check the seasoning. Stir the basil into the tomatoes.
Cook the pasta in boiling salted water and drain as soon as it is al dente. Give it a quick
shake in the colander before tipping it into the tomato sugo. It will have a little of the cooking
water clinging to it, which will just moisten the tomatoes enough. Warm it through and serve.
*taken from the book ‘From Seed to plate’ by Paolo Arrigo, published by Simon and Schuster
