Sweat the onion first

The method is short enough to hold in your head, and the accounts agree on its one non-negotiable step across several separate conversations: soften onion and garlic in oil before the tomatoes go in. People who skipped it describe the result the same way — flat, thin, like warm tinned tomatoes — and the ones who added it describe the jump to something you'd pay for. Carrot and celery, chopped fine and softened alongside, deepen it further; several accounts build on that base. Then the tomatoes: almost any tinned form works — whole, crushed, diced, purée, passata, or a combination — and the accounts' one preference is for whole tomatoes you crush yourself, because one person explains that diced tomatoes are often treated to hold their shape and stay firm in a sauce. A spoonful of tomato paste early, several accounts say, thickens and deepens it. Salt, without which — three separate people are blunt — it will not taste like anything. Then time: fifteen minutes for a weeknight, an hour or more if you have it, longer with meat. If it tastes sharp, the fixes people use are a pinch of sugar (or honey, one suggests), the sweetness of the softened carrot, a splash of milk or cream, or a tiny pinch of baking soda; pick one. The additions the accounts swear by, in no particular order: a hard-cheese rind dropped in to simmer and fished out at the end, which one person calls a game-changer for depth; a splash of red wine; butter or cream at the end for a softer sauce; a little stock, with one account preferring beef stock and arguing a slow meat ragù is a different and better dish; fresh basil at the end, dried oregano and parsley during. Dried herbs are cheap and a jar lasts months, one person notes, answering the objection that spices make this expensive. Two technique points from individual accounts: freeze tomato paste in tablespoon lumps in a bag so you can add one without opening a tin, and finish the pasta in the sauce for its last minute, with a splash of the pasta water, so it takes up the flavour. And one honest thing about family recipes, from someone who tried to learn one: 'a handful' and 'cook until done' are not quantities, and their way of getting the recipe was to cook it beside the relative once.

Usually, a little, and the accounts fight about this honestly enough that the argument is laid out below with both sides. The case for: a tin of tomatoes costs a fraction of a jar of sauce, and a tin plus an onion and garlic you already have produces more sauce than the jar, at a quality several accounts across separate conversations rank alongside the premium brands. The case against, which two conversations make with some force: once you count the onion, the garlic, the oil, the herbs and twenty minutes of your evening, the saving over a supermarket's own-label jar is small — one person puts it at cents — and a jar is more concentrated and faster on a night when speed is the point. Where the arithmetic tips is the tomatoes. Buy them in season and in bulk — a flat of ripe tomatoes at the end of a market day, a roadside stand, a farm, a neighbour's glut — and one afternoon of cooking produces a freezer's worth at a cost no jar approaches; the conversations argue about whether farmers' markets are still a bargain or have gone boutique, and the decider is your town and whether you'll haggle at closing time. Grow them, two conversations say, and the cost approaches zero while the quality goes the other way. Tinned tomato quality matters too: a good tin of whole tomatoes is noticeably better than the cheapest, and some accounts pay a little more for the tin and still come out ahead of the jar. Two other honest positions from the conversations belong here. One: there is a lazy version — good passata, herbs, a few minutes' heat — that one person rates above most jars and that costs almost no effort, so the choice isn't binary. Two: a jar is fine. Several accounts say so directly, and this page agrees — on the night you have no onion or no twenty minutes, the jar is a reasonable answer, and nobody here is ashamed of it. The homemade version is for the other nights, and for the freezer.

Freeze it, unless you have a pressure canner and a tested recipe — and that line is the one piece of this page that isn't taste. Making a big batch at once is the economy the accounts describe across several separate conversations: one long afternoon, a stockpot, and portions for weeks. Freezing is the safe default and the one the people here use. Portion it into old tubs or freezer bags, flat so they stack and thaw fast, and defrost straight in a pan on the night; one person notes it may separate a little and tastes the same. Treat a thawed portion like fresh cooked food — use it within a few days. In the fridge, a splash of lemon or vinegar buys the plain sauce about a week, one account says. Canning is where the accounts, and the safety guidance, get firm. Tomato sauce with onions, garlic, carrots, peppers or meat in it is a low-acid mixture, and the National Center for Home Food Preservation's tested recipe for a vegetable spaghetti sauce requires a pressure canner — not a boiling-water bath — and carries the instruction not to increase the proportion of onions, peppers or mushrooms, because the acidity is what keeps it safe on the shelf. One conversation here argued exactly this with someone who had water-bath canned their carrot-and-garlic sauce and, by their own account, got away with it; the conversation's own weighing is that they were lucky, not right. Dairy — the cheese rind, the cream — is never home-canned. So: if you want jars on a shelf, use a tested recipe from a food-preservation authority and the equipment it calls for; if you don't have that, the freezer does the same job with no risk, and a chest freezer full of flat bags is what the veteran batch-cookers here actually own. The same base, thinned or thickened, becomes pizza sauce, a soup base, or the start of a chilli; a plain uncooked crushed-tomato sauce with garlic, oil and salt is what one person uses on pizza; and the salsa-makers in these conversations follow the same rule as the sauce-makers — salt for flavour, and the fridge or freezer rather than the shelf unless the recipe was written for the shelf.