- Hi and welcome to Vincenzo's Plate. The place where you learn how to cook delicious Italian recipes. Today we're making the king or
the queen of all the sauces, of all the pasta sauces. The basil sugo, it can be a
beautiful sauce for your pasta, for your chicken, for your meatballs, for you pizza or for
anything else that you like. Today I'm showing you the secret
of how to make an amazing, insanely delicious pasta sauce. Follow me step by step. (bouncy lively music) To make the perfect,
perfect sauce, pasta sauce, don't call it gravy, please, it's a sauce. You need to follow these steps, guys, and trust me you will love it. Now, extremely important, you need to do the base of the sauce. You need to do the soffritto. The soffritto is when you
mix these simple ingredients. Extra virgin olive oil,
top quality, of course. You get onion, you get the
celery and you get the carrot. You need these ingredients. Without these ingredients, you cannot make the
sauce I'm talking about. It's very important to use beautiful, fresh basil when you make tomato sauce and here we have beautiful
basil from the garden. So we're gonna use celery, which we're just gonna chop it like this because we're going to blend it. Then I'm going to use about 100 grams of carrot
and these are already washed. We using about one carrot,
which is about 100 grams. (knife banging loudly) Okay, and again, we break it like this. And then we need to use
about 100 grams of onion. So what I'm going to do with the onion. I'm going to cut it like this because this is about 100 grams, okay. Just do this. And we're going to blend it. So when I say blend. This is the base of our tomato sauce. This is, my grandmother,
many Italian grandmothers, what they do is they chop up
these ingredients very thin and then they cook it with
extra virgin olive oil. Well I found a solution, which
I think it makes the sauce give more flavor because we're gonna make a puree right now of these ingredients. So we need to put about 100
grams of extra virgin olive oil, good quality. Then we're gonna put the carrots in there. In there, now we want to put the celery. Break it if you want. Then we put the onion and now we're going to
blend these ingredients. (blender buzzing) And it will get a beautiful cream. (blender buzzing) See, here, we created a
cream made with carrots, celery and onion and
this is what's gonna be the base of our tomato sauce. Important questions. What tomatoes are we gonna
use for the tomato sauce, for the best tomato pasta sauce? Okay, we got three for options. You have the option of
using passata from the shop. You can just buy beautiful
Italian passata from the shop. Easy to go. You can make your own
passata, which tomato puree. When I say you make your own passata, it means if you live in
USA, Canada, Australia, you need to find the best tomato
supplier of Roma tomatoes, but it needs to be the best. What I recommend you,
so you don't go wrong, you can use peeled tomatoes
in a tin like this one. This is a tin of two and a half kilos or chopped tomatoes. So that's what I'm using today,
I'm using chopped tomatoes. There's one important
thing you need to remember, you need to use Italian tomatoes, please. And Italians are proud for
the sweet, juicy tomatoes that we have in Italy. They are so unique, they
grow in our beautiful soil and they do make the difference. So we live in Australia and we have beautiful fresh
tomatoes, great for salads, great for many things
but for the tomato sauce, for pasta sauce, my recommendation is try and buy the Italian
tomatoes in the can or the passata made in Italy. It just makes the difference. So I'm gonna touch it with
my hands, I washed them, I'm gonna show you how it is, see? We have beautiful Italian
tomatoes in there. It's gonna kinda make it
easier for us but not really, like I said, I prefer it peeled
because we still need to go and blend them later on
so, but look at that, see? We've got beautiful pieces of tomatoes. Let's make the magic begin. First thing to do, turn on the heat. We want the fire on but
it needs to be gentle. Very, very, very gentle. So put it down because you don't
wanna burn the ingredients, you wanna do this slowly. And we're gonna put a little
bit more extra virgin olive oil so I will say about
three, four tablespoons. Then what we do is, we're
going to add our mixture here. The mix of carrot, celery and onion and this is what's in Italian
called, the soffritto. Now, like I said before,
many nonnas don't do that. They will never blend it. This is my solution, this is how we do the
Vincenzo's Plate tomato sauce. This is how we're
selling our tomato sauce, this is a secret of how we make Vincenzo's Plate tomato sauce, which we serve at our
markets and in the stores. And this is gonna disappear
in the tomato sauce and this mix, right here,
this soffritto right here, your kids will love it. You know how difficult it is sometimes to get your kids to eat vegetables? You give our tomato sauce. It's kids approved, they love it. Now this moment here. We need to wait about 10,
15 minutes, even 20 minutes to slowly cook it. So I will cover it and you
really need the flavors to make love together,
you need them to take time to get together before
we put the tomato inside. So while the ingredients
are cooking over there. I'm going to blend the chopped tomatoes. I'm blending it up now because
the pan I'm using today, the pot I'm using is nonstick
so I don't wanna ruin the pan. (blender buzzing) Here we have a passata. Okay so after about 10, 15 minutes, we have here our soffritto
is pretty much done. I would recommend you to
keep an eye on it, you know, just to make sure there's no burning. And see the color is darker. That's what you want,
it's darker in color. The flavors are in there. It's saying to me, yes, it's ready. See, so let's put the tomatoes inside. And this moment, it's very important. So let's put our tomatoes in there. (tomatoes gurgling) Beautiful tin of tomatoes and now we want to stir very, very, very well. At this point. We need to let it slow cook
for as long as you want but you need to remember
we don't want watery sauce. So I'm adding an ingredient
that my grandmother always uses and the only one that
she knows how to use. Rock salt, she doesn't know
how to use any other salt. Rock salt, I would say to put
about 10 grams for the amount. There is about 10 grams, put it in there. And just a crack of pepper for now 'cause we put in more later. Just a little bit of pepper for now. We don't put the basil,
basil is last ingredient that we need to put and we
put that right at the end because we don't want to cook the basil, we want the sauce to get
the flavors of basil. So as you can see, there
is nothing else to do. We are going to cover
this beautiful sauce. Cover it and we just wait. From this moment, about one hour to one hour and a half. This is how I love to
make a top quality sauce. Go and stir it every now and then. See you soon guys. It's almost one hour and what we do now is, we remove the lid and we want all the steam to go. We don't want that anymore otherwise it's gonna make
our sauce too watery. So I want the sauce now to become thick so for the next 30 minutes,
45 minutes, probably, I want this to be cooked without the lid and I want the water to disappear. So this is gonna be nice and thick, but it's a beautiful
sauce already, very nice. Guys, today I'm sharing with
you, the secret of our sauces! The secret of our tomato sauce! What we put into each Vincenzo's Plate bottle of tomato sauce. The secret is now
available for you anytime, anywhere, right now on YouTube. Guys, after one hour and a half. This is the moment when
we're going to add the basil. So fresh basil from the garden is a must. What you do is you don't cut the basil, you break it with your hands and you just put it inside
so make sure the heat is off. You don't wanna cook the basil, you want to add the flavors of the basil and this is organic basil, of course. It's our fresh basil from the garden, nothing better than that and, yes, it does make the difference because if you do use
the basil from the shop, you're not gonna get the same thing. So as you can see, I'm
not calculating how much but I will say on the amount I'm using, I would say about at least 75 grams of basil is what you need. 75 grams is the minimum
I recommend you to use. Okay, I think I can mix it now. What we do now, we mix and
the basil is not gonna cook but it's going to reduce, of course, in the sauce because it's very hot and it's going to give the flavor. Right now, this is how you make the perfect, homemade tomato sauce. Pasta sauce, call it whatever you wanna, I call it basil sugo, sugo al basilico. Look at that. I want you to think of
me when you have this, I want you to, in a good
way or bad way, I don't know but I want you to say, this guy is good. This guy is sharing the secret with me. Yes, that's what I'm doing right now. And now all we do is, what I like to do is, let it cool down for a few hours. Even overnight is good, as
long you put the lid on. And at this time, we're
gonna put the lid on but I wanna show you one thing. I wanna show you. (pot clanking) That this is a perfect sauce. Now, this is how we see if
the sauce is good or not. The white plate test. So what we do is, we get an
amount of sauce over here and we want to see if it's watery and if it's watery, I
didn't do a good job. If it's thick, I've done a very good job. Are you ready? Here we go. Ladies and gentlemen, the sauce passed the test. As you can see, there is no water around. Ladies and gentlemen, this is the best part of the video recipe. This is the part where
we are going to try, we're going to eat it. (chuckling) And taste it. It's always best to try this
sauce with a slice of bread that's what I recommend you, but I just love it the way it is. I can't resist it. (slurping loudly) So thank you so much for
watching this episode but we'll see you in the next
Vincenzo's Plate video recipe. E ora si mangia, Vincenzo's Plate. Oh, yeah, now the question is, what pasta are we going to use for this? (chuckling) (lighthearted music) Hi, and welcome to Vincenzo's Plate. The place where you. (laughing) Okay. So. - [Woman] Hang on. - It reduced so much. Oh, I got some in my face! (laughing) Hello. My, God, I've got tomato
sauce all over my face. You need to be careful if
it explodes on your face, it can happen.
