Pasta sauce rewards a little know-how: how to choose it, cook it, store it, and substitute in a pinch. Browse 35 recipes to cook with it.

What is pasta sauce?

Pasta sauce is the jarred, ready-to-pour tomato sauce that sits on the shelf next to the dried spaghetti: cooked tomatoes seasoned with garlic, onion, herbs, and a little oil, usually in the marinara family. Open a jar and dinner is most of the way done.

It exists to save you the hour a from-scratch sauce wants. A good jar already has the tomatoes broken down and the seasoning balanced, so you are buying time more than flavor. Styles run from plain marinara to chunky garden-vegetable, with meat-flavored and creamy vodka blends in between.

Treat it as a base rather than a finished dish.

How to Use It

The obvious move is over hot pasta, but the jar does its best work as the connective tissue in baked dishes. It carries Yummy Lasagna and Super Sunday Lasagna between the noodles, ties together Mimi's Baked Ziti, and soaks into a Classic Baked Pasta Casserole while it bakes.

It also works far from the pasta aisle. Spoon it onto pizza dough, fold it into calzones the way Italian Pizza Calzones do, simmer it into Judi's Pizza Soup, or use it as the braising liquid for chicken parmesan and stuffed shells.

Warm the sauce before it meets the pasta. Finish the cooked noodles in the pan with it for a minute so the released starch helps the sauce cling instead of sliding off.

Doctoring a Jar and What to Avoid

Most jarred sauce tastes flat and a touch sweet straight from the jar, so doctor it. Sweat a clove of minced garlic in olive oil, pour in the sauce, then simmer ten minutes; that alone covers the canned edge.

A splash of red wine, a parmesan rind, a pinch of red pepper flakes, or a knob of butter at the end each push it toward homemade. Salt is the one thing to check before adding any: many jars are already well salted, so taste first.

Browned ground beef or Italian sausage turns a plain jar into a meat sauce for Spaghetti Bolognese without buying the pricier meat-flavored version.

The common mistake is treating the jar as sacred and serving it unwarmed and untouched. The second is drowning the pasta. Sauce should coat the noodles, not pool under them, so add it by the ladle and stop when every strand glistens.

Substitutes

Canned crushed tomatoes are the closest swap when you have a few minutes: simmer them with garlic and olive oil and a pinch of sugar for fifteen minutes and you have marinara. A can of plain tomato sauce works in a baked dish but needs seasoning first.

Pizza sauce subs in a pinch but runs thicker and more oregano-forward, so thin it with a little water. Passata (strained tomatoes) is smoother and raw-tasting, so cook it down. In a true emergency, a can of diced tomatoes blitzed smooth and simmered with herbs gets you there.

Buying and Storage

Read the ingredient list, not the front label. The better jars list tomatoes first, keep added sugar low or absent, and skip the long stabilizer list. Whole San Marzano based sauces tend to taste brighter than concentrate-based ones, and a shorter ingredient list usually means a cleaner tomato flavor.

An unopened jar keeps in the pantry well past a year. Check the best-by date, but trust your nose more.

Once opened, transfer leftovers to a covered container and refrigerate, where they hold about five to seven days. Sauce freezes beautifully: portion it into containers or a zip bag laid flat, and it keeps three to four months.

A film of olive oil poured over refrigerated leftovers slows them drying out, and a jar stashed in the freezer door is the fastest path to a real dinner on a night you have nothing planned.

Quick facts

In Chinese

意粉酱

British (UK) term

Pasta sauce

en français

sauce pour pâtes

en español

salsa para pasta

Recipes using pasta sauce

There are 35 recipes that contain this ingredient.

All 35 recipes