Pasta is one of my favourite dishes, and I love cooking it at home just as much as I love ordering it out at restaurants.
But perfecting a flavoursome sauce can be really difficult, and there are so many recipes out there that it's hard to know which ones are actually going to work out.
That was, until I came across one recipe in particular that claims to be the 'best in the world'. Intrigued by this, I had to give it a go and see if this was actually true or not.
That recipe was crafted by Marcella Hazan in 1992 in her book The Essentials of Italian Cooking, and to my surprise it only contains three ingredients - tinned plum tomatoes, an onion and butter, as well as some salt to taste.
My first thought was this - no garlic? How good can it really be then?
Nevertheless I decided to put it to the test, and the actual recipe itself couldn't have been any simpler. All you need to do is dump all the ingredients into a pot and leave it to simmer for 45 minutes, with no chopping required.
I managed to buy all the ingredients from my local Lidl and got cracking. It felt bizarre just chucking a halved onion into the pot without chopping it first, but I did appreciate that it didn't make me cry like so many other dishes do.
In went the tomatoes too, which I crushed with the back of a wooden spoon in order to make it extra smooth, as well as a generous helping of butter. The recipe recommends five tablespoons, but the block I'd just bought was rock-solid and impossible to scoop up, so I just sliced off an estimate and it seemed to work fine.
All there was left to do was season with salt and let the sauce cook on a very low heat for 45 minutes. I was trying hard to trust the process at this moment, because it resembled a watery onion soup, but time was all it needed for the sauce to reduce into something much more rich and flavoursome.
When the sauce was almost finished cooking, I popped some pasta on to boil and reserved some of the water to help the sauce bind to it. Then, I just removed the onion as instructed and mixed everything together.
Despite just having a couple of ingredients, the sauce was incredibly flavoursome and you could really taste the onion. It wasn't at all acidic, which can happen sometimes when using chopped tomatoes, and the fact it was so low-effort was also extremely appealing.
In the book, Marcella recommends serving it up with some grated parmesan, which was lovely but it also would have been just fine without. I put on enough pasta for three portions, and the pasta to sauce ratio was just perfect.
As for it being the 'best in the world'? Until I've tried every pasta sauce, it's not for me to say, but I'll definitely be making this simple recipe again and again.
Don't miss the latest news from around Scotland and beyond - sign up to our daily newsletter here .
