Give Store-Bought Pasta Sauce A French-Inspired Upgrade

Making from-scratch pasta sauce is easy, but it can be time consuming if you want it to simmer slowly for hours. A good way to get dinner on the table quickly is to use store-bought pasta sauce instead, but it's hard to argue that it could often use a little zhuzhing up. To build flavor around standard store-bought sauce, take inspiration from a classic French Provençale sauce.

Provençale has a similar texture to typical pasta sauce, but because of the different ingredients, it can also resemble a thin salsa texture-wise. It usually contains salty and acidic ingredients like capers and onions, as well as minced garlic, black olives, and herbes de Provence along with its tomato base. It's best to start with a typical jarred tomato or marinara sauce as opposed to one that's already been enhanced with aromatics; this will give the most neutral base for adding these bigger flavors. With that said, there's nothing to say that you can't enhance other jarred sauce types with this same method, such as Alfredo or vodka sauce.

While some of the ingredients — like savory olives and bold, robust capers — can just be added right into the sauce, others need to be cooked down before they're paired with that tomato base. You want the onions to saute and soften against the heat of the pan before they're combined so that they'll be nice and soft as they simmer in with the pasta sauce. Don't add the jarred tomato sauce into the pan until the onions have cooked for around five minutes. 

If you want, you can also let the garlic soften before adding the tomato sauce; just stir the garlic and onions while sauteing to keep the small pieces from burning. The rest of the ingredients (capers, olives, and herbes de Provence) can then be added in right alongside the sauce. Since they don't need to cook on their own, they'll just boost the sauce's flavor while everything simmers together. A sauce like this is perfectly fine to serve right out of the pan, but the flavors and aromas of these ingredients tend to actually get stronger as it sits. You can make this sauce a day or two before serving, then reheat it for maximum flavor.