Julia Child's Simple Secret For A More Vibrant Pasta Sauce

Julia Child always took care to make complex French recipes seem doable for home cooks, but if you're not in the mood for coq au vin, the beloved chef has plenty of wisdom for enhancing weeknight staples. For instance, her "Provençale Tomato Sauce" recipe is fairly simple, with the exception of some special aromatics to make it sing. One of the more unusual yet genius ingredients is orange peel.

Tossing in a bit of orange rind is one of the top tips from celebrity chefs to improve homemade pasta sauce, as it infuses the whole pot with a subtle, refreshing sweetness that creates more dimension than plain old sugar. Tomatoes are a fruit after all, so a touch of citrusy complexity goes a long way towards enhancing their flavor. While rich in aromatic oils, the peel of an orange isn't sour, so you don't have to worry about your marinara tasting overly acidic or like orange juice.

Fresh orange zest makes a fine stand-in for the 1- or 2-inch piece of dried peel called for in Child's recipe, but you may want to use less overall, since fresh rinds have a more potent taste. Whether you grate the peel with a zester or cut a sliver right off of the orange, make sure you don't include the bitter white pith. While Child cooked her sauce for about an hour, zest can still do wonders for a quick tomato sauce recipe, so long as you add it right at the start of simmering.

Appearing in her famed book "Mastering the Art of French Cooking," Julia Child's tomato sauce recipe also includes several fresh and dried herbs, coriander and fennel seeds, and saffron. The latter expensive spice is a staple of Provence, France, thus the name "Provençale Tomato Sauce." If you'd like a warmly-spiced twist on your spaghetti marinara, try adding a few threads of saffron as Child did. And if you're out of fresh oranges, lemon zest or peels can be equally great at perking up a pot of pasta sauce.

If you prefer a richer sauce, Child once showed TV audiences how to make a tomato cream sauce by sauteeing shallots in a pan, then adding a cup of peeled and seeded tomato chunks and a splash of dry white wine or dry vermouth. She then added homemade chicken stock, a bit of cream, and tarragon and boiled it for five or six minutes until reduced. There's no unconventional secret to this sauce, but it sounds plainly delicious.

Another one of Julia Child's best cooking tips for home chefs is to salt sauces at the end of the simmering step. You don't know how much the taste will change over time, especially if it cooks for hours, so waiting to salt a sauce gives you better control over the final flavor. This is sound advice whether you're whipping up marinara, béchamel, or a pan sauce.