Ina Garten's Secret For The Best Vodka Sauce Ever

Vodka sauce is tomato sauce's sassier, more complex cousin. Essentially, it's tomato sauce infused with cream and vodka, simmered to let the flavors build together into a fragrant and decadent creation. If you're wondering what the vodka does in the sauce, it turns out it has a major role in enhancing the flavor profiles of the other ingredients, plus it acts as an emulsifier to help combine acidic tomatoes and rich cream.

Celebrity chef Ina Garten films her "Barefoot Contessa" show in her hometown of East Hampton, New York, so it's no surprise that she pulls recipes and concepts from the delicious restaurants that surround her. Her favorite penne vodka dish hails from Nick and Toni's restaurant in East Hampton, where much of the sauce's complex flavor comes from slowly oven-roasting the sauce, then incorporating the cream at the end. While it's not essential to add this extra roasting step, it helps bring out the deeper flavor in the tomatoes, and in Garten's eyes, it makes the dish so much better.

Roasting tomatoes is an easy way to coax out flavor. To roast tomatoes, you would usually place them in the oven at a high temperature, as the ideal roasting temperature for vegetables is around 425 degrees Fahrenheit. This allows the natural sugars in the tomatoes to caramelize, become sweeter, and concentrate the overall tomato flavor. At a high heat, tomatoes roast pretty quickly and can be done in 30 minutes. 

But Ina Garten's dish uses whole peeled tomatoes from a can, so she does the roasting a bit differently. She crushes them with her hands before adding them to the saucepot with the reduced vodka and aromatics, then roasts for 90 minutes. Garten prefers a lower roasting temperature of about 375 degrees Fahrenheit; canned tomatoes are already cooked and soft, so a low and slow technique works here. Vodka sauce is typically smooth, so it's blended after roasting to remove any tomato chunks. You can use any tomatoes for vodka sauce, but Roma or plum tomatoes are recommended because they don't have as many seeds but still have a hearty, thick texture.

Vodka sauce is traditionally served with penne, but any hearty pasta will work here, such as rigatoni. The ridges in these pasta types help the sauce to stick to each piece, giving you the most flavor in every bite. Since pasta with vodka sauce doesn't involve other ingredients, such as chunks of meat or veggies, you want to get as much sauce in every bite as possible.

Traditionally, the three main ingredients in vodka sauce are tomatoes, cream, and vodka, but Ina Garten enhances her recipe with Spanish onions and garlic. She also includes spices like oregano and crushed red pepper, the latter of which adds just a hint of heat. And like most tomato sauces, vodka sauce should be simmered as the last step. Simmering the sauce allows moisture to evaporate, thickening it and allowing the rich flavors to become more concentrated. In Garten's recipe, roasting the tomatoes for an hour and a half takes the place of a longer simmer at the end, but it's still finished off on the stove.