Ruth’s tomato sauce is a lesson in simplicity: slowly cooked onions melt into rich tomatoes, creating a deep, intensely flavoured sauce with just a handful of ingredients. Paired with silky fresh pasta, it proves that the most memorable dishes are often the simplest. In short, this is pasta al pomodoro at its finest.

Ingredients (serves 6-8)

• 2 cans crushed tomatoes
• 3 tbs olive oil
• 2 medium red onions, peeled and slices as thinly as possible into rounds
• 2 garlic cloves peeled
• 1/4 cup basil

Method

1. Heat the olive oil in a large saucepan or frying pan, add the onions and cook over a low heat until they are very soft.
2. This will take at least 40 minutes – the onions must eventually disappear into the sauce.
3. Some 5 minutes before the end of cooking, add the garlic cloves.
4. Now add the tomatoes and stir to break them up. Season with sea salt and black pepper.
5. Cook slowly, stirring occasionally, for at least 1 ½ hours. When the sauce is ready, it will be dark red and extremely thick, with no juice at all, and the oil will have come to the surface. Serve hot.

Fresh Pasta (makes approximately 1kg)

Ingredients:

• 700g tipo 00 flour, plus extra for dusting
• 1/2 teaspoon sea salt
• 4 whole eggs (5 if they are small)
• 9 egg yolks (10 if the eggs are small)
• semolina flour, for dusting
  

1. Put the flour and salt in a processor and add the eggs and egg yolks. Pulse-blend until the pasta begins to come together into a loose ball of dough.

2. Cut the dough into eight equal-sized pieces and briefly knead them each into a ball. Wrap each ball in cling film and allow to rest for at least 20 minutes, and up to 2 hours.

3. To prepare your dough for cutting into either tagliatelle or ravioli, put it through a pasta machine, following the manufacturer’s instructions.

4. We put each ball through at the thickest setting ten times, folding the sheet into three each time to get a short thick strip, and then turn it by a quarter, and put it through the machine again.

5. If rolling by hand, you will have to hand-knead and hand-roll the dough the equivalent of ten times through the machine. This needs to be done in a cool place so that the pasta does not dry out.