Mar 19, 2019, Updated May 17, 2024 Everyone needs a really excellent crockpot spaghetti sauce in their repertoire. It’s such a comforting meal to come home to on a busy weeknight, but even on a Sunday, nothing beats the flavour of a rich, meaty spaghetti sauce that’s been slowly simmered on low heat all day.
The secrets to best-ever crockpot spaghetti sauce.
Many people believe a crockpot’s best use is for dumping in raw ingredients while the coffee is brewing in the morning, pressing start, and walking through the door at 5 pm to a delicious meal. This is not the case. The crockpot is a fabulous tool, but it doesn’t cook for you. It just simmers things for you. You still need to put in the upfront steps you would if you were cooking stovetop. The best spaghetti sauce starts with onions and garlic sautéed in a hearty glug of olive oil, followed by well-browned meat, and toasted tomato paste. Browning the meat incurs the maillard reaction, which is like caramelization but with proteins, and it’s what gives the rich flavour to a sauce. To brown the meat, unless your crockpot insert is absolutely smoking hot, you have to wait for it to cook and render its fat first. This is the most time-consuming step, but happily it is mostly hands off. You can give it a stir every few minutes while eating breakfast, packing lunches, etc. Toasting the tomato paste is an incredibly underused trick to making good food great. Tomato paste on its own is not tasty. It is acidic and tinny and not something you’d want to eat raw. Apply direct heat and you coax out some beautiful caramelizing of the tomatoes natural sugars. The smell changes. It goes from brassy to toasty and rich. The flavour deepens and the umami intensifies. Try it, I promise you won’t go back.
Add veggies (or more meat) to your spaghetti sauce.
Especially when employing the crockpot, I like to sneak lots of veggies into my spaghetti sauce. They become meltingly tender and disappear into the sauce. I used a whole eggplant here and it really bulked up the sauce. The kids didn’t even notice in there (not that I’d actively try to hide it from them). You could alternatively add big handfuls of chopped greens at the end of cooking, or add some carrots when you saute the onions. Without the eggplant, add another pound of beef for a thick, rich sauce.
How to Serve your Crockpot Spaghetti Sauce.
Obviously, spaghetti noodles are an excellent choice. I alternatively like to serve it with lasagna noodles and a few dollops of ricotta cheese, for a lazy-gal’s weeknight lasagna.
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