Authentic Italian Tomato Sauce

It is so frustrating when people post " this recipe is great" ...but then list 10 ingredients or quantities the changed
Please post your own recipes and just tell me how this recipe is. Yikes.

Beware Brits. If you are cooking this then don't do what I did and use the tomato puree as we know it in UK. As I have since found out, the Americans call what we call Pasatta, Tomata Puree. In UK tomoato puree is the thick concentrated stuff that the Americans call tomato paste. It was like wallpaper paste when finished and a bit too tomatoey, but i still ate it, not wasting that many meatballs :). Anyway, since finding this out I have re-tried the recipe with tomata pasatta instead of puree and it is an absolute gem of a recipe. thanks.

I wanted to add my experience regarding how you saut? the onion and garlic in the same pan and then adding sugar to the recipe. Here is what I%u2019ve learned from my own cooking experience and from reading hundreds of recipes. Many recipes tell you to saut? the onions in the same pan in which you make your sauce as it adds more flavor to the dish. The recipe as posted says to use olive oil and if you have that in the bottom of your pan, you are not likely to burn the onions unless you are saut?ing them at too high a heat. Any sticky bits should then be scraped up as you are adding the other wet ingredients (tomatoes). This only adds flavor, unless you%u2019ve burned them. So cook slowly only until onions soften.
As for sugar being added to the recipe, I have two things to say. The poster of this recipe, %u2018InMemoryofBrats%u2019, says that this recipe was given to her father from a lady from Italy. Most people from Italy didn%u2019t use canned (from the store) tomatoes; they would have used fresh or something they canned themselves. Tomatoes and the sweetness of those tomatoes vary from season to season and sometimes from fruit to fruit on the same bush. To avoid bitterness that some tomatoes have, you can add sugar to make up for not having a sweet tomato. So, check your sauce and if you feel it%u2019s too bitter, add some sugar, a little at a time. Of course then there are some people that just love a sweeter sauce and for them, the two tablespoons of sugar may be needed. I just wanted to clarify this to new cooks and hope it helps someone.

I've been eating this sauce forever, AlliePie is my sister. It is perfect. Oregano doesn't make anything "authentically" Italian. Neither of us use it. This is about as authentic as authentic can get. We should know, we are both authentically Italian. :-)

Caution: Another reviewer said she added a pinch of baking soda to reduce the acidity; I tried this and it took away all the flavor entirely; it was gross. If you're going to add baking soda add the tiniest pinch and test it first. I was so pissed when I ruined the entire pot.