More Perfect Pasta Recipes
Slow-Roasted Tomato Pasta Sauce
This slow-roasted tomato pasta sauce is the recipe that will ruin shop-bought sauce for you forever. Roasting tomatoes low and slow concentrates their natural sweetness and builds a depth of flavour that you simply cannot get any other way. Toss it through pasta, spread it on pizza, or spoon it straight from the pan. Save this one for tomato season when you have an abundance to use up, or make it any time you want a sauce that tastes like it has been cooking all day. Because it has!
Ingredients
- 6 salad (gourmet) tomatoes, sliced in half
- Good amount of olive oil
- Large pinch of sea salt flakes
- 10g fresh basil leaves
- 20g pecorino
- 1 tsp roasted garlic paste
- Juice of half a small lemon
- 1 tbsp pasta water
- Salt and pepper, to taste
- 400g pasta of choice
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 130°C (fan) or 150°C (conventional). Place tomatoes skin side down on a baking tray and drizzle generously with olive oil. Sprinkle with sea salt flakes.
- Bake for 3 hours, or until the tomatoes are jammy and just starting to turn dark at the edges. Remove from oven and allow to cool.
- Cook your favourite pasta according to packet instructions. Reserve a tablespoon of pasta water before draining.
- In a food processor, blitz the roasted tomatoes, basil, pecorino, garlic paste, lemon juice, and pasta water until well combined. Season with salt and pepper to taste.
- Toss the cooked pasta through the tomato sauce and serve immediately.
Notes
- The slow roasting concentrates the tomatoes' natural sweetness and creates a deeply flavoured sauce with minimal effort.
- You can make the tomato sauce ahead of time and store it in the fridge for up to 3 days, or freeze for up to 3 months.
- If the sauce is too thick, loosen it with an extra splash of pasta water when tossing through the cooked pasta.
- This works beautifully with short pasta shapes like penne or rigatoni, but is equally lovely with spaghetti or linguine.
What I Cook With
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Nutrition Information:
Yield:
4Serving Size:
1Amount Per Serving: Calories: 210Total Fat: 3gSaturated Fat: 1gUnsaturated Fat: 2gCholesterol: 5mgSodium: 82mgCarbohydrates: 39gFiber: 4gSugar: 5gProtein: 9g
Please note, this nutrition information is to be used as a guide only. Nutrition information isn’t always accurate.
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Slow Roasted Tomato Pasta Sauce (The Recipe I Didn’t Plan to Share)
This slow roasted tomato pasta sauce wasn’t supposed to be here. And yet, here it is, and I’m genuinely glad it made its way onto the blog. Made with gourmet tomatoes, roasted garlic paste, fresh basil, lemon juice, olive oil, and pecorino cheese, it’s the kind of sauce that feels far more considered than the effort it actually demands.
The Recipe That Came From Nowhere
This wasn’t the recipe I was planning to share today. My first recipe back on the blog since returning to Brisbane in November last year, and it wasn’t even on the list. After five weeks staying with my mum, I moved into my new flat at the beginning of the year, gorgeous balcony, perfect kitchen, and I have absolutely been cooking. I’ve just been consistently forgetting to photograph any of it, which is a very specific kind of chaos that anyone who runs a food blog will understand immediately.
The tomatoes were actually destined for pico de gallo. A big batch for taco night that, as taco nights occasionally do, simply didn’t happen. Which left me with far too many tomatoes and absolutely no plan. So a few weeks later, on a hot, Brisbane summery kind of morning, I decided to slow roast them. A simple little project, I thought. A “how to slow roast tomatoes” post, I thought. I’d get them in the oven, pop out for a matcha date, and come back to something nice and easy.
Well, I did come back to something nice. But then the rain started, and suddenly I was standing in my kitchen staring at a tray of deeply fragrant, collapsing tomatoes, and all I wanted in the world was pasta. So that’s what I made. And this sauce? Hands down one of my new favourites.
On Dates, Variables, and Not Sharing Pasta
Since moving back to Brisbane I’ve been on a few dates. Most of them have become very funny stories for the office, which is honestly not the worst outcome. Only one person made it to a second date, and that second date was, without question, absolutely terrible. So today’s matcha date felt like a reset of sorts, a chance to just see.
How did it go? Honestly, he spent far too much time talking about his ex-wife. And that’s modern dating, isn’t it. It’s hard not to feel a low hum of anxiety when there are so many variables and unknowns involved, and when you’re 42, divorced, and have lived across five cities in three different countries, the pool of people who share that kind of lived experience gets quite small. Australia’s geographical isolation doesn’t help. Finding someone who genuinely understands the texture of a life like mine, the moving, the starting over, the grief, the reinvention, is harder than any recipe I’ve attempted.
I’m not in a rush, though. I’d love to find someone to cook for eventually, because cooking for people is genuinely one of my favourite things. But in the meantime, this pasta is mine and I have absolutely no intention of sharing it.
Why Slow Roasting Changes Everything
The difference between a raw tomato and a slow roasted one is almost philosophical. Low heat over a long time coaxes out all the water, concentrates the natural sugars, and deepens the flavour into something rich and almost jammy. What comes out of the oven tastes nothing like what went in, and that transformation is exactly what makes this sauce so good.
Roasted garlic paste does something similar. Where raw garlic is sharp and assertive, roasted garlic is mellow, sweet, and deeply savoury. Once the tomatoes are done, everything goes into the blender together, the tomatoes, the garlic, all of that deeply flavoured roasting oil, and it comes out as something gloriously smooth and unified. A squeeze of lemon lifts everything at the end, cutting through the richness and brightening the whole bowl. The pecorino adds a salty, sharp edge that parmesan could replicate in a pinch, but pecorino does it with more character. And the fresh basil, torn in at the very last moment, brings back the brightness that the oven took away.
It’s a slow-roasted tomato pasta sauce built on patience. Not a lot of it, but enough to be rewarded.
Ingredients Breakdown
Gourmet Tomatoes
The quality of the tomato is everything here. Salad or gourmet tomatoes have a good balance of sweetness and acidity, and they roast down beautifully without turning watery. The better the tomato, the better the sauce.
Roasted Garlic Paste
Slow roasted garlic loses all its sharpness and becomes something altogether more mellow and complex. It melts into the sauce seamlessly and adds a depth that raw garlic simply can’t replicate.
Fresh Basil
Goes in raw when everything is blitzed together, not cooked at any point. Basil hates heat and turns bitter if you push it too hard, so keeping it out of the oven and adding it straight to the blender is exactly the right call.
Lemon Juice
Added raw into the blender along with everything else. It brightens the whole sauce and balances the deep sweetness the tomatoes develop in the oven. Don’t skip it.
Olive Oil
This is your roasting medium, and it earns its place. The tomatoes and garlic roast low and slow in the oil, and when everything gets blitzed together at the end, that deeply flavoured, tomato-infused oil becomes part of the sauce itself. Use something you actually like the taste of.
Pecorino Cheese
Blitzed in raw with everything else, which gives the sauce a wonderfully salty, sharp richness right from the start. Parmesan works if that’s what you have, but pecorino has more edge and it really does make a difference here.
