Fresh Roma Tomatoes

• Classic Italian cookbook author Marcella Hazan notes that fresh, San Marzano tomatoes are the ideal tomato for spaghetti sauce. These Roma or plum-type tomatoes, narrow and elongated, have less liquid and more meat. Additionally, they cook down to a sauce more quickly, which preserves more of their flavor. If you can’t grow your own San Marzanos or buy them, look for whole canned tomatoes of this variety that are imported from Italy, Hazan recommends.

A Good Recipe

• You don’t necessarily need mushrooms, beef, capers, anchovies or additional secret ingredients to push your spaghetti sauce to extraordinary heights. If you like the fancy stuff, you can add it, experimenting until you find recipes that are keepers. But you may want to try a minimalist approach first with Hazan’s unadorned sugo fresco di pomodoro -- simple tomato sauce. To make it, you need virgin olive oil, garlic cloves, plum tomatoes, salt, black pepper and fresh basil leaves. The resulting sauce is suitable for spaghetti, as well as fusilli, penne or other pasta cuts.

Technique Tips

• Whether you go with a basic or elaborate sauce, good technique helps you achieve the extraordinary. To remove the tomato skins, first blanch them by plunging them in cold water. Drain the tomatoes, skin them and cut them. Slice the garlic very thin and saute it only until it is just golden in the oil. Add the tomatoes and their juice and the seasonings, and turn the heat very low, for 20 minutes, until the oil floats free. At the very end, remove the pan from the heat before you add the basil, so it doesn’t cook. In more elaborate preparations that include onions, vegetables, pancetta, mushroom or rosemary, the additional ingredients are added for gentle sauteing before the tomatoes. Always reduce the sauce with the lid off to avoid creating a bland, steamed flavor, Hazan cautions. The result should a full-flavored sauce with an intensity you won’t found on store shelves.

Check Your Flavor Intensity

• In his book, “Keys to Good Cooking,” Harold McGee stresses the importance of heightened flavor in sauces. The sauce must bring the party to mild foods, such as grain-based products like spaghetti. One trick: Taste your sauce critically as you make it, adjusting the salt and pepper to make it balanced and vigorous, he writes. Roll the sauce all around your mouth, not just on the front of your tongue. Ask a significant other for a second opinion. Hazan concurs, advising that you taste your sauce for sufficient saltiness before coating the spaghetti with it. It must coat a pound or more of cooked, barely salted pasta, she notes.