Author note: I would like to apologize in advance to any Italians that will probably pop a blood vessel reading this.
Let me paint you a picture: It’s 7:30 p.m. on a Thursday, and you are stumbling down to Brooks Dining Hall to get your first meal of the day (the semester is going great, thanks for asking). You saunter over to the pasta station to get your pasta on. You see they put out rotini, the best pasta shape, today — spectacular. This gets your hopes up for a sumptuous meal. You fill a bowl with pasta and reach for the sauce, only to find a bubbling cauldron of marinara waiting for you. You see the chunky “sauce” staring at you, beckoning like an ancient evil. No amount of garlic powder, crushed red pepper flakes or parmesan can save this. Your pasta meal is left unsatisfactory and bland, despite your best efforts.
If you are a pasta enjoyer, like me, you probably have noticed that the pasta station at Brooks only ever serves marinara sauce or some Frankenstein-ed combination of marinara and another sauce. This always disappoints me because marinara has no place anywhere near pasta. Americanized marinara is a basic sauce that consists of just a few ingredients: canned tomatoes, garlic, olive oil and Italian herbs. The sauce is then cooked down to a desired thickness, with thinner sauces used for meals like pizza and thicker sauces used for dipping. While the recipe can be messed around with by adding other ingredients like onion or sugar, the standard base for marinara is just the four aforementioned ingredients. While marinara is unobtrusive, it is also nothing special, and I find it to be wasted potential when it comes to its use on pasta.
Now I admit that traditional marinara has its use with pasta. However, this is Crawford County. There is no way you will ever find traditional marinara here. This leaves marinara only tasting good as a pizza sauce or as a dipping sauce for mozzarella sticks and garlic bread because it is too chunky and bland to find good use on pasta. Marinara isn’t flavorful enough for a plain pasta dish like spaghetti, it is too sweet to cut through stuffed pastas like ravioli or tortellini and it isn’t full-bodied enough to be used in dishes like lasagna or manicotti, which require layers or pools of sauce.
“But Andy? If marinara sauce shouldn’t be used on pasta, what should we use instead?” I hear you clamor. Allow me to enlighten you. You can use a real pasta sauce instead. Admittedly, pasta sauce is an incredibly broad term, encompassing everything from alfredo sauce to a garlic emulsion found on aglio e olio. While marinara technically qualifies as a pasta sauce, there is a reason that in America, it is most commonly used as a dip. Alternatively, tomato sauce is another variety of pasta sauce that is specialized for use on pasta. Tomato sauce is a deep and versatile sauce that begins with frying aromatics in oil. Then, a roux is formed, accounting for the tomato sauce’s creamy and rich consistency. Finally, tomatoes and stock are added, simmering down for hours to form a robust, complex sauce.
Tomato sauce can do everything marinara can do, and it can do it better. It adds a sophisticated flavor to basic pasta dishes like spaghetti. It enhances the flavor of stuffed pastas like ravioli without overpowering them, and it works perfectly in dishes like lasagna, by adding thick, vibrant layers of sauce.
Additionally, tomato sauce is incredibly versatile, serving as a decadent sauce on its own or working as a mother sauce. Do you like vodka sauce? Thank tomato sauce, as it is used as the base. Do you like blush sauce? Tomato sauce is used to cut through heavy and dense cream sauce. Puttenesca? Tomato sauce modified with anchovies and capers. Bolognese? Same base as tomato sauce, with fewer tomatoes and extra meat. The possibilities are limitless. Marinara itself is a version of tomato sauce that has been modified to be chunky and bad.
When attempting to use marinara as a base for other sauces, problems arise. Tomato sauce is smooth and homogenous, and that is why it works as a mother sauce. This allows it to easily fold into other sauces, even those with chunks, getting evenly distributed throughout the mix. Marinara, on the other hand, is defined by uneven chunks of tomato. These chunks prevent marinara from getting evenly mixed into other sauces. This results in some parts of the sauce mix getting dominated by one sauce and other parts being a proper mix. Additionally, the flavor of marinara is so one-note and bland that it does not contribute to other sauces like tomato sauce does. When adding it to other sauces, it somehow manages to overpower the other sauce with the flavor of nothing. I don’t understand how, but for some reason, adding marinara to another sauce turns it into a sauce La Croix. Marinara blush sauce? Wrong! Hint of blush La Croix. Marinara vodka sauce? Still wrong! Eau de tomate La Croix. I am baffled every time I eat the marinara blush sauce at Brooks because it fails to taste like marinara, alfredo or blush sauce!
This all begs the question, “Why even eat marinara in the first place when a more delicious, scrumptious, decadent and sumptuous option exists?”
Exactly! Why even eat marinara in the first place? If you are looking for a quick and easy meal after a long day, just slap together some spaghetti and a jar of marinara, who cares? But if you want to elevate your pasta game to the next level or if you are just making sauce yourself, consider putting in a little extra time to make a sauce that’s exponentially better than anything marinara has to offer. I promise you won’t regret it.
