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I have an excellent recipe for pasta sauce, but I'm having trouble convincing people to try it because it contains a counter-intuitive and potentially wasteful instruction.

The gist of it is this:

  1. Take a tin of plum tomatoes
  2. Pour the tomatoes into a seive and smush up the tomatoes themselves, draining away the tomato juice
  3. Heat with a teaspoon of sugar and a generous pinch of sea salt

The resulting sauce is extremely addictive, but why do I have to drain the tomatoes? Tins of plum tomatoes aren't hugely expensive, but neither are they cheap, and I don't know why we'd want to waste tomato juice. Is it for the sake of taste (perhaps the juice is bitter?), or for texture instead?

Jimmy Breck-McKye
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3 Answers3

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The main purpose is to allow you to get a thick, hearty sauce more quickly. By pre-draining the liquid, you lose a a very small amount of flavor, but save time and energy in reducing the sauce. Otherwise, you would simply have to boil away the excess liquid to get the desired consistency.

SAJ14SAJ
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Draining some of the juice allows you to get to a thick sauce quickly. It may also reduce some of the acidity which may be why you prefer this recipe.

The thickness of the pasta sauce goes hand-in-hand with the shape of the pasta you're making.

Different pasta shapes can hold different amount of water (say fusilli vs spaghetti) and traditionally you boil down the sauce to make it thicker so the pasta can hold it. However, this can have other effects including change of colour.

You can save the tomato juice and make a mean bloody-mary/ceasar with it. Throw in some worcestershire sauce, tabasco, a stick of celery and optionally a stick of dried meat (e.g. beef jerky) and it's a meal onto its own.

Tomato juice is also a great hangover cure. so either way, you can save the stuff and not waste it.

Community
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MandoMando
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It can make your sauce watery and almost impossible to reduce in time for dinner. What I tend to do is drain them off and reduce the remaining liquid in another saucepan while the main pasta sauce is cooking and then add in the end when it's the desired consistency. I suppose it depends on the brand but one must assume that the juice contains a significant amount of water soluble vitamins and taste - my pasta sauce always has an intense rich tomato flavour.

worthwords
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