There’s still some summer left, right? It’s not too late to pick up some peak-o’-the-season tomatoes, is it? There’s no time to waste! Let’s make some tomato-butter sauce using fresh tomatoes this time. Then we can freeze it and enjoy it on January pasta or pizza.

As a reminder, check out our original posting of this recipe. That one used canned San Marzano tomatoes. They’re totally fine, but you can’t beat fresh. I will point out again, however, that out-of-season tomatoes are hardly worth bothering with at all. Fresh in the summer, canned the other nine months of the year, I say.

You can make this with any small and red variety of tomatoes available in your area. Early girls, Romas, San Marzano (or other plum tomatoes), Campari, even cherry tomatoes if you’re willing to clean a whole lot. Anything but beefsteak or heirloom will work; use those for sandwiches and salads. Buy as much as you can fit into your nicest pot. A good, enameled Dutch oven will never let you down.

Wash your tomatoes and remove the stems. Scoop out the stem root with a small utility knife (I like the Global); our goal is to use only the fleshy, red parts of the fruit. Next, we’ll peel and seed.

Fill a big bowl with ice and cold water; place it in the sink. In the largest pot you have, boil enough water to cover all the tomatoes. Drop them in carefully and boil for thirty seconds, then drain and move them to the ice bath. This is blanching, and the second part of the process is called shocking. It will make the tomatoes slip out of their skins as easy as, well, make your own analogy. Make sure your sink is clear and you have lots of counter space to set up a production line: you’ll be removing tomatoes from the ice bowl, peeling their skins into your trash bag or garbage disposal, seeding them over a colander placed over another huge bowl, then crushing them into your final cooking pot. This will let you end up with nothing but tomato flesh and gathered juices from the seeding process, both of which make up the sauce.

Seeding is a messy bit of fun. Halve the tomato with your thumbs, then scoop out the seeds and jelly. Seeds contribute nothing but bitterness; flesh is where it’s at. Crush the clean tomato halves into the Dutch oven, getting them down to no bigger than about an inch. Trust me, it’s faster and cleaner than attempting to chop them.

This process might take a while, but it’s not particularly tiring or demanding. Keep paper towels at hand since you’ll be up to your ears in tomatoes, and if your hands itch, that’s tomato juice doing its thing. Wash your hands and continue. 

Eventually you’ll arrive at a pot full of crushed tomatoes and a bowl of tomato juice. I wish they sold this juice in bottles, by the way; not pureed tomatoes mixed with water, but the actual juice inside tomatoes. It’s a foggy, pink liquid with a crisp flavor all its own. You’ve been saving it as you seeded so you could add it to the pot, so do that.

Ingredient number two: butter. I recommend buying it the same place you get the tomatoes - your local farmers’ market. How much butter you use is kind of up to you. I go with 1/3 - 1/2 of a stick per tomato, depending on its size. The sauce should be pinkish/orangish, but not so oily that you get pools of butter at the top. 

Ingredient the third: one large yellow onion, peeled and cut in half. Place this cut-side-down in the sauce. It’ll contribute sugar, but you won’t keep it in the sauce. When cooking’s done, toss it or eat it as it is. It’ll be sweet and salty and pretty nice, in fact. How about quickly browning it under the broiler and serving it on bread?

That’s all. Start the sauce over medium heat until small bubbles appear on the surface, then go down to low heat and stay there for the next hour or two. You might need to increase and decrease the heat as you go. There should be some movement at the top, but nothing so vigorous that the sauce makes a gurgling sound.

Stir with a wooden spoon every now, and as you do so, break up any large chunks of tomato. This will become easier as fibers break down and the sauce comes together. How long that will take is contingent on many factors: how much you’re making, how juicy your tomatoes were, how well you cleaned them. This can be anything from a very fresh, bright sauce to a fully reduced, roasty-rich flavor bomb. You’ll definitely want to cook off all the water and make the solids and the liquids integrate, but beyond that, it’s your call. If you like a really smooth sauce, take an immersion blender to it right in the pot.

As for salt: add a little bit here and there as you stir. Don’t go overboard right away since the sauce will reduce with time and end up saltier than it starts. 

If you’ve made enough to freeze, let it cool down, then portion it into good zip-close bags. Cooks Illustrated recommends thick, freezer-grade, double-groove bags. Those that slide to close are convenient, but they leak.

Eat it in its jammy, true-to-the-tomato form or add herbs, cheese, or whatever you like on your pasta. Just get those tomatoes quickly, while they’re still delicious. This weekend! Go!

The book that would say all there is to say about pizza - a dish with many complexities, variations, and pitfalls - would be astronomically large, like Borges’ Library of Babel; the best I can hope to do here at Salt & Fat is start small and keep going. Today, I’ll use my weekend dinner as an example.

Pizza with tomato-butter sauce, Scalia anchovies, garlic, and fresh oregano.

More on the first two ingredients later; The Book of Anchovy is a multi-volume treatise as well.

First, let’s note that this is a cheeseless pizza. This is not so because I’m vegan, lactose-intolerant, or because I’m watching my fat intake. It’s simply because not every pizza needs cheese. It’s not a hippie affectation, not a menu substitution: cheeseless pizza is its own fully-fledged thing. In this case, had I added cheese, the garlic and the fresh oregano would’ve fought it somewhat. I wanted a salty-bread type of feeling to my dinner, and the freshly-made sauce needed to show off its sweetness. The creaminess of mozzarella - delicious as it is - would’ve mellowed all this out too much.

A controversial generalization: most pizza is overcheesed. There, I’ve said it.

Next, the order of the ingredients: the pizza went in the oven with tomato sauce, garlic, and a drizzle of oil on it. Both anchovies and fresh herbs are too delicate to be exposed to all that direct heat. When a pizza is good and ready, it’s hot enough to cook a pound of anchovies on contact, so mine go on after baking. No dried-out, bitter acciughe or wilted herbs in my house. Garlic is tricky; a bit of roastiness is great, but turn your back to it for ten seconds and it can burn badly. I used Gus Mueller’s baking method, which results in a cooking time short enough that I could sit there and watch the oven. No, I had nothing better to do on a Saturday night.

I usually go in with another drizzle of olive oil on the slices when plating, but that’s just because I absolutely love Lucini oil; if any savory bread gets between me and it, it’ll get oiled and eaten. And yes, there’s salt on that pizza, too, in addition to the sauce and the anchovies. Just a bit, I swear!

That’s all for now. Keep your toppings first-class and few, perfect your dough and oven before anything else, and trust your gut.

Boiled potatoes, that’s all they are. The reason I name then in Italian is that they deserve a bit of fancying-up, because they’re a good vehicle for discussion of simple ingredients, and because this recipe, like all the best ones, is based on a memory. The memory is of my Sardinian uncle Salvatore eating this three-ingredient dish as an afternoon snack. At twelve-year old, I was horrified. As an adult, I understand.

So, potatoes. What to do with them? Many foods have one “dominant dimension”, a spectrum from A to B; “dry” versus “sweet” wine, for instance. For potatoes, the most important such dimension is starchiness vs. waxiness.

Starchy potatoes are typically seen as “bakers”; they’re dry, mealy, and fluffy when cooked, so these are the guys you’ll want to bake, mash, or fry. Look for Russet, Idaho, or Baking potatoes in your store.

Waxy potatoes are higher in sugar and lower in starch. They hold their shape better than starchies, so you’ll want to use them on the grill, in soups, in salads, and when boiling (as in this recipe). They’ll usually be sold as Red or Yellow potatoes. (Yukon Golds fall in the middle of the spectrum; new potatoes are young versions of any of these, but typically Red ones.)

When boiling potatoes for most any preparation, start them in cold water; don’t wait for the boil to throw them in. They’ll cook more evenly, and faster. Cover the potatoes by 1 inch of water; add a tablespoon of salt; bring to a boil on high, cover and turn down to medium-low; simmer, stirring lightly a few times, for 10-20 minutes.

To test the doneness of your potatoes, you could just poke them, but given a sharp enough knife, this may be misleading (an uncooked potato could give in to easily to a Global blade.) Instead, attempt to lift them out of the water once you’ve poked: they shouldn’t hang on to the knife at all if they’re plate-ready. When they pass this test, drain them carefully and put them back in the (now dry) pot. Then do this wacky thing: Place a clean dish towel over the pot and cover it for a few minutes. What you’re doing here is helping to dry the potatoes a little more without shaking or otherwise upsetting them; that might break them up. The towel will absorb steam and you’ll have moist but not water-logged spuds (It took me this long to use the word spud?)

Next, peel the potatoes (if you want - I do), cut them in half or in quarters, and pour on the olive oil. Salt with fleur de sel. Enjoy as a snack, or as a side to a fish dinner. Salt and fat, helping a simple vegetable taste its best. That’s easy and tasty, and you can make it.