Red Sauce Three Ways

I made enchilada sauce from scratch for the first time this summer. I’m not sure why I’d not made it before, perhaps because we rarely eat enchiladas, or perhaps I thought it would be a long, complicated process. I (more or less) followed a recipe from Annie Somerville’s “Field of Greens” cookbook, which describes a basic red tomato sauce (marinara) with appropriate seasonings of oregano, cumin, ancho and chipotle chile and lime. The sauce was quick and easy to make, and incredibly delicious not just on the stuffed peppers (the original destination) but on scrambled eggs the next morning.

Then in November while in New York, we ate some of the best patatas bravas ever at Buceo 95. The sauce was over the top: spicy, flavorful, addictive. The chef said he used paprika as the only spice. I wanted to make a batch of the sauce to go with latkes for the holiday meal this year, sort of a Jewish/Spanish fusion, so researched recipes to get a sense of how to proceed. The recipes that most closely resembled the sauce at Buceo 95 follow the same idea -- a basic red tomato sauce with spice. (Traditionalists have no fear. There is sour cream and applesauce to go with the latkes as well.) The main variation in this sauce is that after cooking I put it through the food processor to make a puree, a departure from the chunkier enchilada and marinara versions.

Marina is a staple ingredient in my kitchen, not just for pasta, but for poaching eggs, tossing with vegetables and tofu, or whatever. It only takes about 15 minutes to make a batch from scratch, using fresh tomatoes in the summer and good quality canned tomatoes in the winter, and freezing leftovers for an even quicker meal later. I hadn’t thought of red sauce as a multicultural ingredient, and am intrigued by how many ways it can be varied. The recipes are more of a “throw things in the pan” experience than an engineering project, but some ideas are posted here.