Food - Drink

You Should Start Oven-Roasting Your Tomato Sauce. Here's Why

By LAUREN ROTHMAN

If you like to cook, you know that roasting vegetables is one of the best ways to enhance their flavors and intensify their natural sweetness. Fresh tomatoes take on a great depth of flavor when roasted, but it may surprise you to learn that the oven can also work its magic on a pot of oven-roasted tomato sauce.

While you may have tried roasting whole tomatoes before blending them into a sauce, sticking a pot of prepared sauce in the oven gives you a deep, sweet, roasted flavor with less effort. The oven also heats the sauce more evenly than the stovetop does, which concentrates the liquid into a thick, silky consistency.

Serious Eats recipe developer J. Kenji López-Alt starts his sauce by simmering it in a heavy-bottomed Dutch oven pot on the stovetop; then he moves it into the oven, keeping the lid of the pot slightly ajar. The sauce cooks at 300 F for between five and six hours, becoming thick, rich, and jammy.

The final sauce is almost like a tomato jam, so to put some fresh tomato flavor back into it, López-Alt adds some reserved canned tomatoes to the pot before serving. Alternatively, you can oven-cook your sauce for only a few hours to concentrate its flavor, so you don't have to add more tomatoes at the end.

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