The Unexpected Breakfast Ingredient You Should Be Adding To Your Pasta Sauce

Pasta sauce is one of those staple recipes that have achieved mythic proportions in households across the country. Whether you call it tomato sauce or tomato gravy, there may be a splattered, hand-written recipe card that brings you straight back to your childhood and the lore of your own family's traditional sauce (or perhaps the secret is so closely guarded that it has never been written down). Regardless, people have very strong feelings about pasta sauce and the idea of a "secret ingredient" looms large. 

Whether it is brown sugar or Worcestershire sauce, adding that extra level of unidentifiable but craveable flavor is like the holy grail of sauce. Why not try an unexpected breakfast staple as your very own flavor accentuator by adding ground coffee. Coffee is known for its punchy and robust service to many as a pick-me-up in the morning, but it serves in this capacity to add an unexpected extra layer of umami flavor to either a batch of all-purpose homemade tomato sauce or as a way to doctor up one of the top-ranked store-bought marinara sauces.

The idea here is to round out the inherent sweetness of the tomato, garlic, and onions in the sauce. You won't taste the coffee per se, but what you will taste is an overall deeper flavor profile. You may have seen ground coffee used as an ingredient in a rub to tenderize meat. The idea behind adding the coffee to a rub is to capitalize on the tannins present in the coffee that help break down the connective fibers in the meat, as well as acting as a flavor booster. 

Adding coffee to pasta sauce uses a similar principle. Adding a tablespoon of finely ground coffee to your batch provides just the right hit of tannins (the kind that make your mouth tighten a bit), which balances the sauce's tomato-forward identity. Make sure to use finely ground coffee, as you don't want any potential grittiness from a coarser grind hampering the mouthfeel of your sauce. You could even use some leftover coffee from your morning brew if you have some on hand. Who knows, coffee may end up becoming your signature tomato sauce move to pass along.