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Comment by benterix | Hacker News Reader

This is almost a religious matter among my Italian colleagues and I see a few blasphemies on this video already. The recipe I was taught on the hills of Tuscany 30 year ago is so perfect and simple I'll never prepare pasta in a different way.

* First slice garlic and put it a pot together with excellent quality olive oil

* Fry it until garlic becomes slightly yellow but nor brown, and in the meantime in a separate pot boil pasta

* Add tomato sauce to oil/garlic and boil them together

* When the pasta is ready, add it to the mix

It's absolutely delicious in spite of its simplicity.

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Cooking the garlic from the start makes it lose all its flavour, unless you use a tonne. Using tomato sauce is a very small convenience (maybe 40minutes worth, which mostly is waiting) vs making the sauce from scratch from fresh tomatoes.

The main issue with making sauce from scratch is getting rid of the skins, and in order to do that you can blanch the tomatoes: get 1Kg of fresh tomatoes, score them in a cross from side to side and place them in a pot (stem down), pour boiling water on them until they're fully covered. Wait until the water cools down, then peal the tomatoes and dice them in cubes. Place the cubes in a pan and cook with a lid for about 10-15m, then crush them with a potato masher. You now have tasty tomato sauce from scratch.

> Cooking the garlic from the start makes it lose all its flavour, unless you use a tonne.

Yes and no. It does lose its typical flavor but gets transformed and this new flavor is transferred onto other ingredients.

As for sauce vs tomatoes, you are probably right, but only when you have full flavor tomatoes available - and unfortunately where I live they are not that great in the winter.

Personally I _always_ got better taste in the sauce if I make it from tomatoes, even supermarket bought ones in the winter. But it might be just some bias that I haven't done it from a can in a long time. :)

Some suggestions, take it or leave it: - delay the boiling of the pasta until after you added the tomato sauce to the pan. Tomatoes enjoy spending a bit more time on the stove, it makes a difference. - when adding the pasta to the mix, add a bit of the pasta-water (the water in which the pasta cooked). It acts as a very powerful emulsifier and will make the sauce stick better.

Thanks, I'll try and see how much difference it makes.

What's your tomato sauce?

I do something similar but add pepper flakes with the garlic, use canned tomatoes and finish with some butter.

Well, everybody around there bought the same thing, it was 100% tomatoes without any salt or basil etc. added in. The advantage of using it over fresh tomatoes is that where I live now the fresh ones tend to lose flavor in colder months.

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