Making jar spaghetti sauce taste homemade

Using a jar of spaghetti sauce to create a great meal saves a lot of time and money. While it would be ideal to be able to make a homemade sauce every time, it isn’t always possible. With the high quality and variety of sauces on the market, however, it doesn’t take very much to touch up a jarred sauce. When it's done right, no one will even know that you didn’t do all the work yourself.

Add meat

You can take a basic jar of marinara sauce and add some meat to make it a great meal. Italian sausage can be sautéed and thrown into the sauce with some jarred roasted peppers. This sauce is perfect to throw into the slow cooker in the morning when you leave for work and you will come home to a pot filled with sausage and peppers which can be served on a hoagie roll or over pasta. The only real work involved in this meal is sautéing the Italian sausage. If you want to use pasta, you can even stick it right in the slow cooker with everything else and have a complete meal in a pot.

If you prefer, you can add a pound of cooked ground beef, a bag of frozen meatball or sautéed chicken. Once the sauce has cooked for several hours with the other ingredients, no one is going to know that you used jar sauce.

Other additions

If you didn’t get your meal started and you are now home and need to come up with a homemade tasting meal using you jar sauce and you only have a few minutes, there are still some great things that you can do.

Cream

Take a jar of basic sauce, add a good splash of heavy cream or half & half. This will turn the bright red sauce a pretty pinkish color. If you want a protein, chicken is a good choice with this sauce. Grab a jar of roasted red peppers and slice the peppers thinly and add to the sauce.

Hopefully, you have a jar of artichoke hearts on hand, chop the hearts into bite-size pieces and add to the sauce. Dice a small one and add to olive oil and chopped garlic in a sauté pan and sauté with the chunks of chicken. Meanwhile, boil up a pound of pasta. Add all the ingredients together and cook for about 15 minutes. 

Parmesan

Grate some fresh Parmesan cheese over the top and serve with crusty Italian bread. You can also add some Parmesan when you are warming up the sauce to give it a unique flavor. 

Just because you need to use a jar of spaghetti sauce it doesn’t mean that your meal can’t taste homemade. With a few of your own touches, you can make jar spaghetti sauce taste homemade and turn the pedestrian into something really special.