idk who needs to hear this, but I know that someone has been making red sauce for their pasta and can't figure out why it doesn't taste right and why it doesn't stick to the pasta
It doesn't taste right because you need a spoon or two of sugar. That bright metallic flavor that cuts through the sauce and keeps if from tasting right is tamed by a little bit of sugar. You want enough to mellow down and round out the flavor profile, but not enough that the sauce turns sweet.
It doesn't stick to the pasta because you need to add a ladle of the water from the pot you cooked your pasta in. There's starch in that water and it will thicken your sauce up and make it gluey so it sticks to the pasta
extra tip: if you only cook the pasta about halfway in the water and then finish cooking it in the sauce, the pasta will pull water out of the sauce and thicken it. But you still need some of the pasta water in the sauce, for the starch. And don't put raw pasta in the sauce and try to cook it that way, it won't work right.
Took me like ten years to catch on to the sugar thing, and now my red sauces are top notch.





















