Stretching Spaghetti Sauce | Joyful Homemaking (2024)

FAQs

How can I stretch my spaghetti sauce? ›

Empty the pasta sauce into a pot to simmer. Then, ladle a few cups of pasta water out of the boiling pasta pot and allow it to cool. Add the water to the empty sauce jar, shake it up, then pour it into the simmering sauce on the stove. The starch will thicken and create more sauce.

The longer you let homemade spaghetti sauce simmer, the thicker it will get. I've let sauce simmer on the stove for up to seven hours before, and it's turned out nice, thick, and delicious every single time.

There's two ingredients in Pasta dough: flour and a liquid. The liquid could be water or eggs, sometimes a bit of oil, nothing else. Use water if you're using Durum wheat, otherwise go for eggs. If you want your dough more elastic, just play with the strengh of your flour, use a flour with more gluten.

If the sauce tastes a little flat or uninspiring, play around with spices to give it more depth. Add more salt, a few grinds of cracked black pepper, or dried herbs like rosemary, oregano, or thyme. (Fresh herbs, too – a handful of basil will give the sauce a bright, fresh flavor.)

If your tomato based sauce is to thick, an easy way to thin it out without losing flavor is to add in some tomato juice or tomato water. If you don't have either of those, there's a product that is dehydrated tomato powder that can be mixed with regular water to keep some of the tomato flavor.

The key is to add a little bit of liquid. The most common thinner for any creamy sauce is milk, however, you can also use other liquids like water, broth, or cream. Note that the liquid has to contain moisture so it can actually work, which is why melted butter won't do.

Add butter

Yes, that's right. Toss in a few tablespoons of butter, and let it melt into the sauce. If you've never tried it before, it might seem strange, but a little butter makes tomato sauce rich and smooth, and also balances out too much acidity, which is common in jarred sauces.

The minimum time you should simmer sauce is 30 minutes. This is about how long the oils take to disappear into the sauce (rather than pooling on top). But you should consider simmering for three or more hours, letting it lazily cook away, no more than a few straggling bubbles surfacing at a time.

Boil Before Simmering

Generally speaking, simmering is the perfect method for cooking and reducing sauces of all kinds. But to avoid watery tomato sauce, we're going to bend this rule just a bit. We need to quickly deactivate the enzyme that breaks down pectin. For that, we need to boil the sauce!

Does cooking spaghetti sauce longer make it thicker? ›

Tomatoes naturally contain lots of water, so cooking any tomato sauce for a long period of time will help eliminate some of the water content. The water will slowly but surely evaporate, leaving behind a thickened, full-bodied sauce with lots of flavor.

The most readily available sauce-thickener is flour. For a too-thin sauce, try adding a slurry (equal parts flour and water, whisked together) or beurre manie (equal parts softened butter and flour, kneaded together to form a paste)—both are ideal thickeners for rich and creamy sauces, such as steak sauce recipes.

If you find that your sauce is too thick, this is where you can add some of the reserved pasta water, little dribbles at a time. If you over-water and the sauce becomes too thin, just let some of the liquid cook off and you'll see the sauce thicken up again. It's pretty resilient to fumbles at this stage.

To rid a sauce of larger pieces like bay leaves or vegetable bits, simply run it through a sieve. For a very fine and clear liquid, it is best to pass the mixture through a fine cloth strainer or a cotton tea towel.

If you're making a white sauce, add an egg yolk to stabilize the emulsion. If your sauce is a tomato-based sauce (like marinara), add some heavy cream to stabilize the emulsion. The heavy cream will help bind the oil with the tomatoes, creating a thicker consistency.