Best Spaghetti Recipe With Homemade Meat Sauce

These days, people are busy, and I get the temptation to use the pre-made stuff from a jar, but making it from scratch doesn’t take that much more work, and homemade spaghetti sauce tastes so good that it’s worth the small extra effort. Meat sauce also freezes well, so if you’re really pressed for time, you can make a big batch of this on the weekend, portion it, then just pull it out of the freezer, reheat, and toss with freshly boiled spaghetti on a weeknight.

Why This Recipe Works

What are the ingredients for Meat Sauce?

Broadly speaking, spaghetti sauce has three main components, the aromatics, the meat, and the liquids.

Meat

Ground Beef - Meat sauce gets most of its flavor from the ground beef, so I like adding a relatively high ratio of lean ground beef. If I have the time, I like to grind my own beef, so I know exactly what’s in it, and it also allows me to grind it coarsely, which gives the sauce a better texture. Ground Pork - I like to add a bit of ground pork, which adds savory umami to the sauce. Ground lamb, chopped bacon, or Italian sausage are other good alternatives.

Aromatics (a.k.a. Sofrito)

Garlic - Garlic makes almost anything better, and I like adding lots of minced garlic cloves to my sauce. Onions - Onions add flavor and mild sweetness, but it’s important to caramelize them to get the most flavor out of them. One of the tricks to doing this quickly is to mince them as small as possible. Carrots - Carrots are a traditional part of sofrito, but they need to be cooked for a long time to dissolve into the sauce. By grating them, this not only speeds up the time it takes to caramelize them, but it also allows them to dissolve seamlessly into the sauce in minutes instead of hours.

Liquids

Red Wine - Although white wine will work, I like using red wine because it gives the sauce a deeper color and flavor, which makes it seem like the sauce was cooked for much longer. Tomato Puree - Although I use whole canned tomatoes for my slow-cooked Bolognese, I like using pureed tomatoes for this because it reduces the cooking time as the tomatoes are already broken down. You can substitute whole stewed tomatoes if you like, but I recommend mashing them up a bit first before you add them. I do NOT recommend using diced tomatoes, as these have been picked before they’re fully ripe so that they can maintain their shape after being diced and canned. Tomato sauce doesn’t have as much tomato flavor as tomato puree, and tomato paste lacks the freshness that puree provides. Ketchup - A small amount balances out the acidity of the wine and tomatoes while adding a concentrated tomato flavor and spices.

Spices

Oregano - The classic Italian herb for a homemade spaghetti sauce recipe, oregano provides an herbaceous note to the sauce. Black Pepper - Provides heat and floral notes, and pairs well with the meats and wine. Other Spices - I’ve kept this recipe pretty classic and simple, but if you want to kick it up a notch, red pepper flakes, dried basil, or even my Umami Seasoning Salt would make great additions.

How to Make Spaghetti With Meat Sauce

The Spaghetti

Water takes a while to boil, so I always start by putting a large pot of salted water on to boil. I usually add 1 tablespoon of table salt for every gallon of water. This ensures each strand of pasta is well seasoned. Any kind of spaghetti will work, but spaghetti noodles come in thicknesses ranging from 1.4mm to 2.2mm thick. While any thickness will work for this pasta recipe, thicker noodles take longer to cook, while thinner noodles will take less time, so check the package to figure out the right amount of time to boil the pasta. I usually boil it for 1 minute less than what the package says and then finish cooking it in the sauce.

The Sauce

The first step to making any great sauce is to caramelize the aromatics. This is a process that can normally take up to an hour to do properly, but by cutting the aromatics small, adding some baking soda, and steaming them covered with a lid, we can reduce this down to around 13 minutes. Amongst its many superpowers, baking soda has the ability to break down the aromatics, which makes them cook faster and eventually dissolve into the sauce as if they’d been cooked for hours. It also raises the pH of the mixture, which speeds up both caramelization and the Maillard reaction. Both of these browning reactions lead to the creation of new flavor compounds, which take pungent, spicy onions and turn them into mellow, sweet flavor bombs. Once the garlic, onions, carrots, baking soda, and olive oil mixed together in a pan, I cover it with a lid before turning on the heat. This traps the steam escaping from the vegetables. Since water vapor is much more efficient than air at transferring heat to the aromatics, it makes them cook through much faster. After about 10 minutes of steaming, you can remove the lid and boil off any remaining liquid, while allowing the aromatics to caramelize in a matter of minutes. Then, I add the beef and pork and crumble them up a bit with a spatula before adding the wine. You want to add the wine to the meat before it’s fully cooked as the liquid keeps the ground meat from getting tough (which would require a lot of time to tenderize). Finally, the tomato puree, ketchup, oregano, salt, and pepper get added, and I cook this together over medium heat to get it to reduce quickly. You should be able to get the sauce to the right consistency in under 10 minutes. Still, it’s important to stir it continuously, which not only prevents the sauce from burning, it also speeds up the evaporation of excess liquid. You can tell when the sauce is done when you can scrape a spatula along the bottom of the pan, and the sauce takes a moment to fill in the gap.

Put them Together

This is perhaps the most important step because it marries the two components of this dish together. Once your meat sauce is nice and thick and your pasta is about a minute from being fully cooked, transfer the spaghetti straight into the pan with the sauce using tongs. Don’t worry about the starchy pasta water that hitches a ride because this extra liquid allows you to finish cooking the pasta in the sauce. If your spaghetti starts to clump up, just add more pasta water 1 ladleful at a time as you mix. When the pasta is cooked to your liking, and each strand is coated in a glistening layer of meat sauce, it’s done! At this point you can serve it or you can grate in your favorite dry cheese such as Parmigiano-Reggiano (a.k.a. Parmesan), or Pecorino Romano and stir it in.