How to cut sweetness in spaghetti sauce

Add more spice

If you’ve taste tested your sauce and you think it is too sweet, try adding more spice. Any spice that is bitter, sour or salty will do the trick. But steer clear of any spice that has a sweeter taste as that will only worsen your problem.

Adding lime juice can to your dish can balance out the sweetness. In case, you don’t want too much of tanginess in the dish you can also add vinegar white wine vinegar, red wine vinegar, balsamic vinegar.

Adding baking soda will change the pH of tomato sauce, making it less acidic. Generally, we balance tomato sauce acidity by adding a bit of sugar. While sugar can’t neutralize acidity in the same way that baking soda can, it does change our perception of other tastes.

If there’s too much sugar for your batch of sauce, increase the amount of sauce until you restore the balance—add more crushed or puréed canned tomatoes. If you’re working with fresh tomatoes, chop a few extra and cook them until soft in a separate saucepan. Taste the sauce and repeat if it’s still sweet.

Bertolli Tomato and Basil, $3, 24 ounces

It’s the least sweet of all the jars, making it the perfect purchase for those who like a dryer tomato sauce. Like Newman’s, it also has a familiar taste and reminded some editors of more traditional sauces.

Heat 1 cup of sauce with 1/4 teaspoon baking soda (baking soda neutralizes acidity). Taste the sauce and add tiny amounts of baking soda to see if it mellows the acidity. If there is still an edge, swirl in a teaspoon of butter, letting it melt until creamy. Usually this does the job.

Pasta dishes turn out tasting bland because the pasta noodles were cooked in unsalted water, olive oil (or butter) was added to the pasta water, the noodles were rinsed after cooking, or because the sauce wasn’t seasoned enough.

If you’re missing umami

Add some anchovy paste, fish sauce, or parmesan cheese. (You can also add a parm rind, but try to add it early on.) All three of these bring that savory flavor your mouth craves. Tomato paste can also be added, but you need to brown in first.

The reason for sprinkling a pinch of sugar into a simmering saucepan of tomatoes is simple: sugar cuts the acidity of the tomatoes and creates an overall more balanced sauce. The exact acid levels in tomatoes can vary quite a bit depending on whether they’re fresh or canned, the tomato variety, and the time of year.

The best wine to use in spaghetti sauce is Chianti, or any wine made from Sangiovese grapes. Its moderate tannins and full range of flavors, from cherry to leaves to tobacco and sometimes mushroom, add depth of flavor to any red sauce.

Want to ramp up the umami even more? Try adding mashed capers or chopped caperberries to the mix. They will add even more salty, briny flavors to your sauce. If you want to change the flavor profile of this recipe slightly, use shallots instead of onions and reduce the cooking time.

Use umami-rich seasonings

Using umami-rich seasonings such as ketchup, molasses, tomato paste, fish sauce, soy sauce, oyster sauce, Worcestershire sauce, Marmite, or miso paste is a quick fix of umami.

What is Umami Sauce? In layman’s terms, that means that umami is category of taste in food corresponding to the flavor of glutamates, especially monosodium glutamate, which occur naturally in many foods including meat, fish, vegetables and dairy products. To make things easy, you can think of it as the fifth taste.

Ingeniously built around the use of eight umami-rich ingredients—aged cheese, tomatoes, mushrooms, soy sauce, miso, caramelized onions, smoke, and nutritional yeast—Umami Bomb’s 75 recipes are bursting with the sublime, savory fifth taste—and they’re vegetarian!