Instantly Enhance Your Store-Bought Tomato Sauce With A Korean Condiment

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Unless you've chosen the best store-bought pasta sauce brand, there's always a chance that you will fall victim to an uninspired store-bought tomato sauce. A great tomato sauce is simple and uses high-quality ingredients to create depth of flavor, while an insipid one can taste a lot like distilled disappointment. We've found a great hack for spicing up your tomato sauce, quite literally, by adding the Korean chili paste gochujang to your sauce and caramelizing it on the stovetop. In terms of tricks that can take your dinner from "ho-hum" to restaurant-quality with just a few minutes of work, it doesn't get better or easier than this.

Gochujang has a fiery, funky flavor, thanks to the Korean red chilis and fermented soybeans in the paste, which are bound together with glutinous rice and salt. In your tomato sauce, it's going to add layers of flavor to a concoction that could otherwise come across as flat and one-dimensional. The spice isn't off the charts, making it suitable for even timid eaters, and a gochujang tomato sauce can be the basis for several delightful pasta dishes. We haven't been this excited about a cross-cultural recipe hack since we used another Korean staple, kimchi, to upgrade our tuna salad! You can add as much or as little gochujang as you want, just make sure to heat it low and slow with your tomato sauce to allow the flavors to mix together and meld seamlessly.

You can basically swap this gochujang-infused tomato sauce 1:1 in any pasta dish that uses a tomato sauce base, although there are some dishes in which it really sings. With a simmered Parmesan rind and a splash of heavy cream (or a plant-based ingredient you can easily swap for heavy cream in pasta sauce), you have a simple, elegant meal that calls to mind penne alla vodka. We love the idea of using a gochujang sauce in a chicken or veal parm, especially if you zhuzh up the breading on the protein cutlets with some additional red pepper flakes for a bit of bonus heat! Or simplify your life and use your Asian-inspired red sauce as the foundation of an excellent Bolognese with some hearty, meaty ground beef or hot sausage. Your plain pasta dinner just got way more exciting.

One of the most exciting aspects of gochujang from a home cooking perspective is that it can last unopened for almost two years in the pantry, or in the fridge for about a year after being opened. This means that, within reason, you don't have to worry much about it going bad, and that it will wait faithfully to be used on a weeknight when you want to spice up a quick dinner. Now that's a shortcut we can definitely get behind!