13 Homemade Pasta Sauces to Make When You're Tired of Marinara

A bowl of pasta with Bolognese sauce on a textured cloth with a small bowl of grated cheese off to the left side. — Serious Eats / Julia Estrada

This collection of recipes features our best versions of the classic pasta sauces you crave, so you can treat it as an advanced class in Italian saucemaking. Start, perhaps, by nailing delicate emulsifications in sauces like carbonara or alfredo. Next, play with several Bolognese methods to decide which is your favorite—a combination of every kind of luxurious meat, or a simple ground-lamb variety. Finish by understanding that Genoese pesto made with the mortar and pestle really is superior in flavor.

By the way, just because these are our best versions doesn’t mean they’re “authentic.” We won’t apologize for a clever trick that makes emulsifying a cacio e pepe sauce easier, or for a vegetarian-but-just-as-satisfying ragu made of mushrooms. And while these sauces were originally meant to go on pasta, feel free to get clever and use them elsewhere—carbonara roasted squash, anyone? Cacio e pepe tenderloin? The possibilities are—if not endless—at least very broad.

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Arrabbiata Sauce

Vicky Wasik

When you’re looking for a simple way to upgrade a classic marinara sauce, arrabbiata, its spicy counterpoint, is a good place to start. This dead-easy recipe involves little more than sautéing garlic and red pepper in olive oil, then stirring them together with fresh or canned tomatoes (depending on the time of year) and cooking the whole thing down until the flavors meld and concentrate. You can customize the dish’s level of spice to your liking, but keep in mind that “arrabbiata” means “angry” in Italian—so you’d be doing the sauce a disservice if you didn’t push the spice level as high as you can handle.

Arrabbiata Sauce
Pesto alla Genovese

Serious Eats / Vicky Wasik

Pesto variations are so ubiquitous in our current dining culture, and that makes sense—combining herbs, nuts, cheese, and oil is endlessly riffable and delicious. Refreshingly, perhaps, this recipe will bring you back to pesto’s Genoa roots: a perfect balance of basil, pine nuts, Parmesan, and olive oil. Because the sauce is so simple, using fresh and excellent versions of each ingredient is important. And in side-by-side testing, Daniel found that pesto made in the classic way, with a mortar and pestle, yielded a more richly flavored sauce, with a texture that better clung to the pasta than one made in a food processor.

Pesto alla Genovese
Carbonara Sauce

Whether carbonara was invented to appease American soldiers’ palates when they were stationed in Italy after World War II or has much more ancient origins, it’s undeniable that the combination of egg, pork, and aged cheese is one of life’s great pleasures. Like many Italian dishes, this one has a pared-down ingredient list, so choosing each wisely will make a huge difference in your final product. Here, Daniel opts for a higher ratio of egg yolks to whole eggs, which makes for a richer, tighter sauce. A combination of Pecorino Romano and Parm gives the sauce the right amount of sharpness, without overwhelming with saltiness. And cooking the sauce over a double boiler allows you to carefully thicken the egg yolks without as much risk of forming scrambled curds.

Carbonara Sauce
Slow-Cooked Bolognese Sauce

Serious Eats / Julia Estrada

This is the ultimate Bolognese sauce recipe, designed for those snowy, cold days when you want to spend the whole afternoon warming yourself by a steaming pot of slow-simmering meat (though actually, it’s made in the oven!). We’re not cutting any corners here: You’ll use a luxurious combination of beef, lamb, pork, pancetta, and chicken livers to yield the ultimate level of richness and complexity. As if that weren’t enough, fish sauce and Parmesan lend further umami complexity, and the whole thing gets finished with a bit of heavy cream, which binds everything together.

Slow-Cooked Bolognese

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Vodka Sauce

Daniel Gritzer

If you’ve always wondered whether the vodka is really doing anything in this Italian-American red-sauce classic, the answer is yes. Kenji found in a series of blind taste tests that the alcohol brought out fruity flavors and aromas in the tomato, and lent a slight sharpness that cut through the richness of the sauce. A couple of other tricks take this sauce to the next level: Using both tomato paste and canned tomatoes leads to more layered flavor, combining depth and brightness. And undercooking the pasta, then finishing it in the actual sauce, will lead to better absorption, ensuring each bite has perfectly balanced and melded combinations of sauce and pasta.

Vodka Sauce
Mushroom Bolognese

J. Kenji Lopez-Alt

Here, Kenji set out to make a vegan sauce where a long and slow braise resulted in a rich, hearty sauce that’s as satisfying as a meaty Bolognese recipe. A few tricks make this dish just that. Adding basil at the beginning and end of the cooking process means the sauce gets both complex cooked herb flavor and a pop of freshness. Frying chopped mushrooms before they go through a long simmer gives them a chewy texture and concentrated savory flavor that’s reminiscent of ground meat. An additional vegetable—eggplant—lends thick, creamy texture. The aged, fermented flavors of miso and soy sauce also contribute to a complex meatiness.

Mushroom Bolognese
Mac and Cheese Sauce

Serious Eats / Morgan Hunt Glaze

This cheese sauce achieves the holy grail balance of mac and cheese: the creamy, emulsified texture of the boxed stuff, with the flavor of actual cheese. Cornstarch and evaporated milk stabilize the sauce, while adding egg creates a rich, custardy texture that better clings to the noodle. For cheese, you’ll use cheddar for that aged depth of flavor, but add a little American for its powers of emulsification.

Ultra-Gooey Stovetop Mac and Cheese Sauce
The Best Italian-American Tomato Sauce

Serious Eats / Diana Chistruga

This is supposed to be a collection of recipes that goes beyond marinara—and rest assured, that’s just what this perfect tomato sauce does. Unlike a quick marinara that you’ll use sparingly on pizza, this is the kind of long-simmering, deeply-flavored tomato sauce that a red sauce Italian joint stakes its reputation on. It hinges on a few things: Good-quality canned tomatoes, crushed by hand; a base of garlic, butter, and oil; the addition of carrot and onion, which naturally sweetens the sauce without any need for added sugar; and finally, a long time on low heat, which allows the sauce to caramelize and saturate with flavor.

Italian-American Tomato Sauce

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Alfredo Sauce

Vicky Wasik

If the alfredo sauce of certain chain Italian restaurants has always struck you as disgustingly rich, we recommend trying this Roman-style Alfredo sauce recipe before you completely write the dish off. Invented as recently as the 20th century by an Italian man whose name was actually Alfredo, it involves a much older Northern Italian combination of butter, Parmesan, and pasta water. You’ll notice a distinct lack of heavy cream. This sauce is still rich, rich, rich, but it’s also nuanced and nutty and peppery—never cloyingly, clunkily thick.

Alfredo Sauce
Spaghetti Napolitan (Japanese Ketchup Pasta)

Serious Eats / Melati Citrawireja

This dish is popular in Japan’s kissaten, retro cafes that blend Western and Japanese elements. While the recipe originally used canned tomatoes as the sauce base, wartime scarcity led chefs to use ketchup as a pinch-hitter—a substitution that remains in place in the dish to this day. Here, Kierra Wright-Ruiz uses the ingredient as she would tomato paste, browning it along with soy sauce and Worcestershire to deepen the flavor. What results is tangy and sweet like ketchup, yes, but also deeply savory and umami-forward.

Spaghetti Napolitan (Japanese Ketchup Pasta)
Creamy Anchovy-Butter Sauce

Sasha Marx

This is fettuccini Alfredo for people who aren’t afraid of their umami coming from anchovy, rather than Parmesan. It’s for those who crave a creamy sauce that also packs a serious flavor punch. Emulsify a simple combination of butter, anchovies, and pasta water into a silky sauce, and coat long strands of fettuccini or buccatini in it. And by the way, we have a sneaking feeling that non-anchovy lovers will love it, too.

Creamy Anchovy-Butter Sauce
Perfect Cacio e Pepe

Serious Eats / Amanda Suarez

Cacio e pepe’s sauce is so simple—just cheese, pasta water, and pepper—but the emulsification can be painfully tricky to master. Here, Daniel allows you a little cheat in the form of a cornstarch slurry that keeps the sauce from breaking or clumps of un-emulsified cheese from forming. We promise, no one will know.

Perfect Cacio e Pepe

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Lamb Bolognese

Bolognese recipes like the one above rely on multiple types of meat to lend unctuousness, savoriness, and even sweetness in their turn. This recipe, on the other hand, gets away with using ground lamb alone. Lamb’s savory complexity is unparalleled, and by combining it with a marinara and a glug of red wine, you’ll also achieve bright sweetness. Cream, butter, and Parmesan add the richness that a pork or chicken liver might in another meat sauce.

Lamb Bolognese

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