Simple Tomato Sauce

Make it step by step

1. Tip the tomatoes and all their juice into a wide bowl.
2. Crush them one at a time in your fist until no piece is bigger than a thumbnail, keeping your hand below the surface of the juice as you squeeze.
3. Do not blend them. A blender whips air through the pulp and turns the sauce orange and foamy, and it shears the flesh so fine that the sauce never gains any body no matter how long it cooks.
4. Pick out any hard pale core and any stray piece of skin as you crush.
5. Warm the olive oil in a wide, heavy pan over medium-low heat.
6. Add the sliced garlic and cook for 2-3 minutes, until it is pale gold at the edges and smells sweet.
7. Pour in the crushed tomatoes, standing back from the pan as they go in.
8. Add the 3g of fine salt and push the basil stalks under the surface.
9. Bring it to a bare simmer, where bubbles break slowly in two or three places rather than pattering across the whole surface.
10. Cook uncovered for 40-50 minutes, stirring every 10 minutes and scraping the base as you go.
11. Crush any tomato still holding its shape against the side of the pan with the back of the spoon.
12. Watch for the finish rather than the clock. The surface stops looking wet, a spoon dragged through leaves a trench that holds for a second, and a rim of orange oil separates out and beads around the edge of the pan.
13. Keep going until you see that oil. It is the signal that the water has finally cooked out, and a sauce taken off before it appears will slide off pasta and soak straight through a pizza base.
14. Fish out the basil stalks, which will have given up everything they have.
15. Stir in the cold butter off the heat, until it melts in and the sauce turns glossy. It rounds off whatever sharpness the tomatoes came with.
16. Taste and add salt.
17. Spread it on the classic margherita pizza in place of the crushed tomatoes there, or thin it with a ladle of the hot starchy cooking water the cacio e pepe explains, and toss it with pasta in the pan.
18. It is also the tomato base of the slow-cooked beef ragu in this collection, where the same hand-crushed tomatoes go in after the wine.
19. Cool it and refrigerate for up to five days, or freeze it in portions. It makes about 600ml, enough for four bowls of pasta or three pizza bases.