Quick Tip: Tomato-Ricotta Sauce

This is a quick tip for an alternative to a tomato-rich tomato sauce.

I’m sure I didn’t invent this recipe—or probably any other—although it is possible to have an idea and not know that others have had that idea before. So, go on and keep inventing without Googling to see if someone got there before you.

I think one day I was just looking for a way to make tomato sauce appeal to my husband without dumping sugar into it. Generally, he thinks it’s sour, because he’s not a true lover of the tomato, but he does love a cream sauce, so I figured I could make one with the ricotta that was on hand by just pulsing it in the blender or food processor and adding it to the sauce. It makes an interestingly pink-ish sauce and does cut down on the sharpness of the tomato. My sauce started out with my own crushed tomatoes and roasted tomatoes that I have in the freezer, bacon and ground beef, lots of garlic and seasonings, but you could do this trick with any sauce from a jar.

I pulsed 15 oz. of ricotta in the food processor, with a little of the cooked sauce to thin it, until it was creamy. Then I just stirred it into the sauce that had been cooking for about an hour. It could have been served that way on pasta, but I decided to make the additional step of baking the pasta mixture for 20 minutes, with lots of Parmesan on top.