19 Tips From Celebrity Chefs To Improve Homemade Pasta Sauce

While many choose to sip wine with their pasta, Ina Garten believes in adding it directly to the sauce. It's the secret ingredient to her best marinara sauce because it makes the sauce more robust. The Barefoot Contessa herself adds red wine to bolognese and plain marinara to help round out the flavors and make it a tasty pairing for pasta. 

To make her wine-infused sauce, Garten adds Chianti to the pot with the onions and garlic after they are cooked and softened. The wine picks up any residual caramelized flecks of the alliums, which further gives the sauce a more powerful taste. She uses a half-cup of wine for her standard sauce recipe and proceeds to cook off some of the alcohol on medium-high heat before adding in the rest of her ingredients. This reduces the alcohol and makes the flavors meld together much more effortlessly.

Spaghetti carbonara is a heavy dish, to say the least. It's ladened with eggs, pancetta, cheese, and butter — which can make it overwhelming to eat. Ina Garten gives carbonara a fresher, lighter twist by adding fresh vegetables like snow peas, asparagus, peas, scallions, and chives and making an ingredient swap. Instead of using butter, Ina Garten tosses the sauce with her favorite olive oil. This veggie-forward pasta is much lighter in flavor and can be paired with a light summer salad or bread for a whole meal. 

She also reduces the heavy cream in the sauce by about half to make the dish a little less creamy. However, Garten notes that the cream can also be substituted entirely for water and a sprinkle of Parmesan to mimic the flavor. As she tells NPR, traditional carbonara is undoubtedly tasty, but it means "you want to take a nap afterward." 

We're always looking for ways to build a no-waste kitchen, and Emeril Lagasse's tip for making a lobster cream sauce will both make a more flavorful pasta accompaniment and use up the leftover shells. He uses seafood stock as the base for the sauce but will steep lobster shells in the stock to add a more robust fishy profile. The lobster shells also infuse a unique flavor profile, making this dish more lobster-y than just a bland seafood pasta. 

For an optimal flavor profile, the shells should be allowed to steep in the stock with a mirepoix and herbs for at least an hour. Lagasse recommends storing the shells from your lobster tails in the fridge before making the stock. You can freeze the stock to use at a later date, but the sauce (with cream added) should not be frozen. When you're ready for a date-night dinner, pull out your frozen stock, finish the sauce, and add your pasta for some fresh-from-the-sea flavor, courtesy of Emeril Lagasse. 

Parmesan cheese is often thought of as an ingredient to add to pasta after it's finished cooking, but Giada De Laurentiis opts instead to add the cheese to the pasta before the sauce. As she explained to Williams Sonoma, her grandfather used to use this Neapolitan method of tossing the cooked pasta with cheese because "the sauce sticks to the cheese, which sticks to the pasta." This creates a wonderful synergy of sticking, which means every noodle is flavored with the perfect amount of sauce. 

The other unexpected way to add cheese to your sauce is to stir it in while your pasta sauce is cooking down on the stove. This addition's timing means that the shaved Parmesan's umami flavor can infuse into the pasta sauce — providing a vegetarian alternative to other umami additions. 

The key to making a great tomato sauce starts with your tomatoes. Standard red tomatoes tend to lack in the flavor department — especially if you're not picking them straight from the vine. According to Alex Guarnaschelli, the next best type of tomato to add to your sauce are yellow tomatoes. Her tomato sauce recipe substitutes the classic red San Marzano tomatoes with bright yellow beefsteak tomatoes. 

She notes that these tomatoes are "fleshy" in texture and have less acid, which makes them an ideal tool to add texture to the red sauce without straying too much from the familiar tomato flavor. Guarnaschelli keeps her tomato sauce simple with other ingredients like olive oil, garlic, shallots, rice wine vinegar, seasoning, and a generous topping of Parmesan cheese. 

Fennel is an unexpected but flavorful seasoning for a range of Italian dishes. It's not particularly bitter or spicy, but it does have a unique licorice undertone. It's why Ina Garten makes her penne arrabbiata with fennel seeds. Instead of leaving the seeds whole in the sauce, Garten chops them with a knife into small pieces. 

As she explains in a video posted on the Food Network's YouTube channel, this extra step allows the seeds to release more of their oils and infuse them into the sauce. "And fennel has this anise flavor that's just great, particularly with tomatoes," she explained. Garten will avoid using ground fennel because it loses its flavor and opts for this simple trick instead. 

Every recipe has its own special tool. But nothing replaces the ability to use a kitchen tool for things beyond its intended use. The unexpected tool Scott Conant uses for tomato sauce is a potato masher. In an interview with Serious Eats, the chef explained that growing up, he hadn't ever seen people mashing potatoes, but there was always a potato masher in a drawer. His mother and grandmother inspired him to use this tool to make tomato sauce.

A potato masher is an ideal instrument for making tomato sauce because it doesn't aerate the mixture as an immersion blender does. To make his sauce, he adds the seeded, halved tomatoes to a pot that has been warmed up with some olive oil. Then, he sprinkles the salt and uses a potato masher to break down the tomatoes into small pieces.

You might be wondering why you should add water to the pasta after it's finished cooking. After all — you don't want to make your dish too watery! But this magic water contains tons of starches, which can help elevate the texture of your dish. 

Alex Guarnaschelli's go-to method to dress up non-dairy pasta sauce is adding water to the sauce. She makes a simple, non-dairy pasta sauce with olive oil, bright lemon, and toasted almonds — and encourages the sauce to stick to the pasta with a splash of water. Giada De Laurentiis' trick for silky carbonara is to temper the eggs in the pasta water before mixing it with the guanciale. This raises the eggs' temperature and ensures the mixture comes out perfectly smooth. 

We always say it's important to eat your veggies. And Giada De Laurentiis' tip to sweeten pasta sauce provides a hefty serving of Vitamin A. The celebrity chef uses carrots instead of sugar to enhance her pasta sauce. She peels and chops a whole carrot and adds it to the tomato sauce with the celery. It's critical to cook these hard vegetables down early so they have time to infuse flavor into the sauce as it's cooking. Then, she adds the tomatoes and herbs and cooks the mixture until soft and fragrant. 

To ensure no bits of carrots are left floating around in the sauce, she opts to use a food processor. She shares that the sauce can be stored in the freezer for later use, or poured onto al dente pasta.

Tomatoes aren't the only fruit that deserves a special spot in your tomato sauce recipe. The Pasta Queen says your pasta sauce may be missing fruit — and all of the flavor and textural benefits it brings to a sauce. Nadia Munno loves experimenting with these ingredients and pairing them together to take her sauce to a new level. 

One of her favorite pairings is apples and sausage. She uses green apples to give the sauce a bit of sourness with subtle, sweet notes. Munno recommends picking fruits seasonally — and there's no shortage of options at any time of year. Munno has tried orange canteloupe and prosciutto for a twist on the Italian prosciutto e Melone appetizer. In the summer, a berry and ricotta pasta dish could also provide seasonal flavors and a bright pop of color to a pasta dish.