Making jarred pasta sauce deliciously your own

JARRED PASTA SAUCES ARE HAVING A MOMENT. Once something that many home cooks publicly looked down on (and maybe secretly used), they’re increasingly being seen as smart time savers for, well, all of us.

It’s been a bit of a journey getting there, though. At one end of the scale, James Beard Award-winning online publication TASTE shared a piece entitled “Shattering the Jarred Pasta Sauce Stigma.” In it, food writer Jason Diamond discussed his “appreciation for jarred pasta sauces, particularly those coming from red sauce joints of note, including Carbone, the Meatball Shop, and, of course, Rao’s.” In other words, if you buy the fancy stuff, it’s okay.

Bon Appétit-affiliated Epicurious takes a more practical, less judgmental approach in “5 Ways to Amp Up Jarred Pasta Sauce.” As authors Katherine Sacks and Joe Sevier put it, “cooking with a jar of store-bought marinara can be a serious time saver. And by deploying a few easy tricks, you can make it taste great, too.” They offer five ways to dial up the flavor, ranging from simple to reasonably complex, and offering ways to create a variety of tastes from your store-bought red sauce.

We’ve been using jarred red sauce for years, partly because it helps us get a weeknight meal on the table quickly and partly because we really like it. Here is how we’re cooking with it these days, making it better, making it our own—and this is not so much a recipe as it is some ideas you can play with.

• Start with a jarred sauce you like. Our current go-to is Trader Joe’s Spicy Chunky Tomato & Pepper Pasta Sauce. It is all the things the name says. Whatever sauce you start with, think of it as the base, the tomatoes that cooked for hours to become a marinara sauce.
• Make it more tomatoey. We generally add a can of diced tomatoes, juices and all, and some tomato paste.
• Add a little wine, if you like. Nothing fancy needed—we use less than a cup of Trader Joe’s Charles Shaw Cabernet Sauvignon.
• Add some greenery. We like to add a little frozen chopped spinach, both for the flavor and the added nutritional goodness. You can nuke it with a tablespoon or so of water, or just stir the frozen spinach into the cooking sauce.
• Dial up the umami. Our favorite way is to cook up a little Italian sausage and stir that in. Or we’ll chop up some leftover rotisserie chicken and add that. Or mushrooms.
• Make it your own. The above is what we like to do. But feel free to experiment—fresh or dried herbs, chopped zucchini or other vegetables, grated Parmesan, cream stirred in late in the process… you get the idea.

Want some more inspiration for cooking with jarred pasta sauce? You’ll find the Epicurious article here.