This recipe for spaghetti sauce is excellent. One jar of sauce is never enough for me. I enjoy the flavor of fresh ingredients as well. In this dish, I prefer to incorporate both! The red wine is the only thing that matters. Serve your preferred pasta topped with mozzarella cheese and mushrooms.
| Prep Time: | 20 mins |
| Cook Time: | 35 mins |
| Total Time: | 55 mins |
| Servings: | 20 |
| Yield: | 10 cups |
Ingredients
- 2 tablespoons butter
- 1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil
- 1 (8 ounce) package sliced fresh mushrooms
- 1 cup red wine, divided
- 1 pound ground beef
- 1 cup diced yellow onion
- 1 cup diced tomatoes
- ½ cup chopped red bell pepper
- ½ cup chopped green bell pepper
- ¼ cup minced garlic
- 2 tablespoons oregano
- 2 tablespoons basil
- 1 tablespoon rosemary
- 1 (6 ounce) can tomato paste
- 1 (28 ounce) jar spaghetti sauce
Instructions
- Melt butter with olive oil in a small skillet over medium-high heat. Cook and stir mushrooms in butter and oil until softened, 2 to 3 minutes. Pour in 1/4 cup red wine and bring to a boil. Reduce heat to medium-low and simmer until mushrooms are very dark and shrunken in size, about 20 minutes.
- Meanwhile, heat a large pot over medium heat. Add ground beef, yellow onion, diced tomatoes, red bell pepper, green bell pepper, and garlic to the pot; cook and stir until beef is completely browned, about 10 minutes. Season with oregano, basil, and rosemary.
- Stir 3/4 cup red wine and tomato paste into beef mixture. Pour spaghetti sauce into the pot; stir. Bring to a simmer and continue cooking until flavors blend, 10 to 30 minutes. Serve over your favorite pasta and top with mushrooms.
Nutrition Facts
| Calories | 122 kcal |
| Carbohydrate | 10 g |
| Cholesterol | 18 mg |
| Dietary Fiber | 2 g |
| Protein | 6 g |
| Saturated Fat | 2 g |
| Sodium | 251 mg |
| Sugars | 6 g |
| Fat | 6 g |
| Unsaturated Fat | 0 g |
Reviews
I think this recipe is superb. The only things I did different is I substituted pork sausage for the ground beef, couldn’t find the olive oil in my wife’s kitchen, nor the mushrooms. We have fresh rosemary, basil, and oregano in our garden. I had about a half jar of Prego spaghetti sauce in the fridge. So I put all the above ingredients in a blender, except the sausage which I cooked in a frying pan, and added to the half jar of Prego sauce. Mixed the sauce with the spaghetti and enjoyed one of the best spaghetti dishes I have ever tasted.
Delicious, this was my third time making it, my family loves it
I made this and like some of the other people, I changed things up a little. I felt the amount of spices was way to much. So glad I cut them back. I did add roasted garlic that helped quite a bit. The sauce was ok but would have had to throw it out if I had used all of the spices, or would have had to add another jar of sauce. I also left out the meat and mushrooms as the children don’t like them in their sauce. It might be worth making again, maybe.
Delicious! Thickened the sauce as well.
We loved it. I was a little short on tomato paste and red wine but it tasted great anyway. I used olive oil instead of butter, frozen chopped onions and peppers, so all I had to slice were mushrooms.
I followed the recipe to a t, and used an expensive tomato sauce. I didn’t like it at all, although by boys didn’t complain.
Amazing! Left out the green and red peppers. The whole family thoroughly enjoyed it
I have done this for years when I was a working Mother and wanted a good sauce without going for homemade. The only difference in mine is that I don’t add the bell peppers, oregano (not a fan) or rosemary to the jarred sauce. I add one can of diced tomatoes, the red wine, fresh basil, onion (It can be dried, but I usually chop a fresh one) mushrooms, and a couple squeezes of tomato paste. Also add a bit of sugar, after tasting. The red wine gives it a richness and flavor level that is delicious, but you can leave it out, if preferred. I use either ground beef, or sometimes cooked italian sausage, sliced. This whole process takes 10 minutes, tops. To the complainers who said this takes almost as long as homemade, you either didn’t try it or you chop very slowly, plus homemade needs to simmer for quite some time to blend the flavors. This is quick and delicious. Try it, you’ll like it.
When the kids were young and I was working full time, I made a version that the kids still call “Hurry Up Spaghetti.” Serve over spaghetti squash and you have a healthy alternative to canned spaghetti (which I secretly love!).
This is what I usually do with sauce in a jar. This time, I took another reviewer’s advice and used from instead of white sugar. Really a unique taste and my husband loved it. Thanks for all the suggestions!
This really perked up a can of store bought spaghetti sauce. I didn’t follow all of the steps. I just added the ground beef, olive oil, onion, garlic, spices and wine to the sauce. I also added a 1/4 cup of grated Parmesan . I dumped everything into a crockpot and let it simmer on low for 6 hours and it turned out great.
My family loved it! I do make my own sauce from scratch and we do like that better but we all thought this was a great substitute for a quick weeknight dinner. I used some sauce I got on sale, got pre sliced mushrooms, garlic from a jar and dried minced onions so there was no chopping at all. got it cooking before I did the noodles so it had a little time to simmer and it turned out great. thanks for the idea!
Kind of labor intensive. Although it is good it takes almost the same amount of time to make it home made. I was looking for something simple and this really wasn’t it.
I love the principal here and that’s to take any jar of pasta sauce and doctor it to something approximating homemade. I used Tomato sauce instead of paste,added Italian seasoning and a bit of brown sugar to counter the acidity. As per another website, I also added a pat of butter at the very end – it’s supposed to smooth out the sauce and help eliminate acidity. To put this recipe to a real test, I bought the store’s cheapest pasta sauce. The end result is really great. The benefit of going this route rather than the ‘totally from scratch’ route, is a shorter cooking time, and, really, a more reliable end product. I would use this for company any time.
Interesting recipe.
great way to stretch a jar of sauce when you have to. tasty, as long as you use a brand of sauce you like and of decent quality.
I omitted the butter and increased the olive oil (to be honest, I have used butter in a tomato-based sauce before and I did not like the end result). I left out the meat because I was using this sauce for a Baked Ravioli recipe. I also cut back on the rosemary a bit because it can be quite potent and I didn’t want it overpowering the sauce. I also added a couple tablespoons of brown sugar. I let this simmer for a little over two hours. My jarred sauce was a more expensive quality and I used a good bottle of burgundy. VERY GOOD. You would have thought I cooked this from scratch!
Understand that this spaghetti sauce only will be as good as the jar of pasta sauce that you use, and there is a fair amount of chopping and slicing involved. This just isn’t a quick weeknight meal where you brown some ground beef, add a jar of sauce, and then serve over some pasta. My husband bought a jar of Classico Basil and Tomato Pasta Sauce which has been sitting around collecting dust, so I decided to give this recipe a try. If you’re going to do this much prep work, you might as well use canned tomatoes (fresh would be even better) and make your own spaghetti sauce rather than using a jar of pasta sauce as the base. The recipe also doesn’t tell you when to add the mushrooms that you’ve sautéed. We ate it, but I thought it was just ordinary and not tasty enough to justify all of the prep work and the fairly long of ingredients that you’d be using if you made your own spaghetti sauce. Sorry for the bad review, but this just didn’t work for us.
What a great idea! The point of this recipe, as I understand it, is to up the flavor and freshness profile of sauce from a jar. Even a very good sauce from a jar is still going to taste like sauce from a jar.
Zero point in this one. You are just making your own spaghetti sauce, esp if you increase the paste or add a can of crushed tomatoes. Unless you have your own garden (and many of us don’t), it is more cost-effective to just buy a better jar of sauce!