Winter Tomato Sauce & Rice Cakes alla Norma (gf)
Fire up the oven for a rich, canned tomato sauce and baked rice cake dish
Perhaps it is a personal deficiency, but I stay away from medium-bodied tomato sauce. In the summer, I like to grate tomatoes for a fresh sauce. Maybe I’ll hit it with a little bit of heat, but that’s about it. In the winter, well, hold for a moment and I’ll tell you about an oven-roasted tomato sauce that is rich, simple, and delicious.
Folks certainly have opinions — imagine if I stopped the sentence there! — about which canned tomatoes to use. And I suppose I do to (whole1, peeled) but I have made this sauce plenty of times with course ground tomatoes, diced tomatoes, and whole tomatoes, from numerous producers, both store brand and imported Italian tetra packs, and have never had a result that I didn’t care for.
Winter Tomato Sauce (v|gf)
yields about 2 quarts
1/4c extra virgin olive oil
1 medium onion, diced
1 head of garlic, smashed and chopped
1 tbsp tamari
2 tsp crushed red pepper flakes
1 tbsp tomato paste
1/4c vermouth or wine
2 28oz cans of tomatoes (see above)
s+p
Preheat your oven to 375 degrees.
In an oven safe pot, heat the olive oil over medium high heat. When the oil begins to shimmer, sweat the onions. Toss them around a little bit and salt them. Once they are translucent — you don’t want deep color at all — and the garlic, tamari, and crushed red pepper flakes.
If you do not need this recipe to be gluten free or vegan soy sauce, fish sauce, anchovies, or Marmite would all work in place of the tamari. They all behave a bit differently from one another so start shy of one tablespoon and see what you think. It is easier to add more than to take something away.
Once the garlic is fragrant, add your wine.
You can omit the wine, but, you know… This time around I used some sweet vermouth, but I have used dry vermouth. I’ve also used both red and white wines. All change the sauce a bit in their own way. In our home, cooking is about delicious value, so we generally use what we have on hand.
Let the wine nearly evaporate and then add the tomatoes. Rinse each can, filling it about halfway with water, and add that to the pot as well. Bring everything to a boil, and then put the uncovered pot in the oven.
It’ll get nice and toasty as it roasts for the next two hours.
When you remove it from the oven the top can looked lightly burned, which is great. That layer of caramelized tomato is going to add depth to your sauce.
Use an immersion blender or regular blender to make the sauce homogenous. Taste it while you are blending. Sometimes it’ll need a little hit of acid (balsamic or red wine vinegar) or a bit more salt. I try not to season the tomato sauce all the way as the more blank I leave it, the more flexible it can become when I remove a quart from the freezer. For example, a little bit of gochujang sends the sauce in some exciting new directions that can be great with, say, udon noodles and cabbage.
What I did with half of the sauce was make Rice Cakes alla Norma. One of my favorite pasta dishes is Paccheri alla Norma: eggplant, tomato sauce, cheese (usually ricotta salata). However my wife has some gluten issues and so years ago I started using rice cakes instead of pasta. True, the cakes are closer to gnocchi than paccheri, but what can you do? It’s become a staple in our house — I generally make it every time I make tomato sauce — and I made it this weekend for her birthday.
Without further ado:
Rice Cakes alla Norma (gf)
Serves 6 with a salad.
1 package of Korean rice cakes
1/2 of the Winter Tomato Sauce above (~1 qt)
1 eggplant, cubed to diced
Smoked paprika and/or gochugaru to taste
8oz smoked mozzarella
(optional) 8oz mozzarella (fresh or not)
salt
oregano or similar dried herbs
Preheat oven to 375 degrees (or leave it on from when you made sauce) and bring a pot of water to a boil.
Cut up your eggplant. I like to cut off the ends so it can stand up. I then use my knife to remove about half of the skin in strips from end to end, alternating to make a striped pattern. I like the tannic nature of the eggplant skin but I don’t like to chew it very much and this gives me the best of both worlds.
Sautee in extra virgin olive oil over medium high heat with a bit of salt and smoked paprika and/or gochugaru until just cooked through. Set aside.
Prepare rice cakes according to the package. When they are tender, drain and dump into a lubricated 9x13 baking dish. Add the sauce as well as the eggplant. Toss to coat with a spatula or, if you have latex gloves, your hands.
If you are using fresh mozzarella, cut into slices or cube it and mix it in with the mixture. The non-smoked mozzarella goes in the dish, the smoked mozzarella tops the dish. In a 9x13 dish you should be able to cover the top more or less with 8 slices of smoked mozzarella.
Cover the dish with aluminum foil and throw it in the oven. After 25 minutes, remove the foil and let bake until the cheese browns; about 20 minutes more. Remove from the oven and let rest for a few minutes. Top with dried herbs and extra virgin olive oil (the best one you have).
As always, I hope you enjoy and let me know if you make this or any other recipes here or on Instagram.
Thank you for your patience as we navigated the holidays and all sorts of other stuff.
Nearly everything whole is better. Next time you are shopping, price a whole chicken and a whole cut-up chicken. The cut-up chicken should be cheaper. Why? They can mix and match chickens to make one chicken. If a chicken has, say, a broken leg that bird cannot be sold whole. But three quarters of that chicken can be sold! This doesn’t mean product x is inferior to product y, but this does help explain the price difference.