Alton Brown's Spaghetti Sauce Uses This Canned Staple Instead Of Milk Or Heavy Cream

Sure, a good tomato sauce is hard to get wrong. But to really get your spaghetti sauce right, you can add a splash of dairy. While many home cooks add milk or heavy cream to simmer with tomato-based sauces, Food Network star and celebrity chef Alton Brown adds a unique dairy twist to his meat sauce and spaghetti recipe: evaporated milk. While you might think of the canned dairy staple for tres leches cake or macaroni and cheese, canned evaporated milk is useful in a variety of cooking applications. When added to pasta sauce, it imparts a subtle silkiness without all the fat of heavy cream or whole milk. 

Evaporated milk is made by cooking off 60% of the water in milk, which results in a thickened form of the liquid dairy product. This gives it a creamy texture and rich taste, similar to cream but with a lower fat content. Evaporated milk — which usually comes in at about 7% fat content — is a great alternative to the sometimes overly rich taste of heavy cream, which has a higher fat content of at least 36%. And compared to regular, whole, or low-fat milk, evaporated milk is more concentrated. This lower water content allows it to incorporate seamlessly into tomato sauce without thinning out the sauce, making it too watery, or adding an overly fatty flavor. 

The lower fat content is a win for people cutting fat in their diets, but also contributes to a balanced pasta sauce. Evaporated milk adds a rich creaminess without overpowering the acidic, tangy, and somewhat sweet taste of tomato-based pasta sauce. In Alton Brown's meat sauce and spaghetti recipe, the celebrity chef combines a mix of highly flavorful ingredients in the sauce, including bacon, ground beef chuck, ground pork butt, white wine, mushrooms, and beef stock; not to mention the aromatics of onions and celery in the recipe, and of course, the diced tomatoes. Adding fattier dairy like heavy cream to this kind of pasta sauce would likely flatten the other flavors. Instead, using evaporated milk achieves a soft dairy flavor.

In his recipe, Alton Brown adds evaporated milk to homemade pasta sauce before simmering it slowly for hours to develop a deep, rich taste. However, a bit of evaporated milk also works well to instantly tame a simple acidic tomato sauce, sans the fatty mouthfeel or taste of cream. This can be as simple as stirring some evaporated milk in when cooking with your pick of the best store-bought pasta sauces. Or sub evaporated milk in place of cream when making a creamy penne alla vodka, so it's not overly rich in taste.