Best Spaghetti Meat Sauce Recipe

If you are looking for the best spaghetti meat sauce recipe then you have come to the right place. In this post, I will give you 5 simple steps to follow for this easy meat sauce recipe that is homemade and includes browned ground beef for an incredible flavor.

Making your own homemade spaghetti sauce from scratch has so many benefits.

You are not using a jar of sauce that has all kinds of added ingredients and preservatives that you don’t need.

Another benefit is cost. You can most likely make a lot more and a better sauce for less money. Just freeze the extra and pull it out for a quick meal during the week.

Video – How to make a spaghetti meat sauce

Ingredients

1 lb ground beef
1 yellow onion
3 cloves garlic
1 tbsp Italian seasoning
salt to taste
ground pepper to taste
28 oz crushed tomatoes
15 oz tomato sauce

Equipment

Frying pan with lid
Spatula
Chef knife
Cutting board

Easy meat sauce recipe | 5 Steps

This homemade sauce from scratch can be put on any pasta that you like. We prefer it on spaghetti or angel hair pasta.

You could add this to a fettuccine or elbows.

If you are gluten-free there are a lot of kinds of pasta that are made now without gluten including rice or some zucchini noodles. All of these would go great with this recipe.

If you are making lasagna this meat sauce will also work great. Cook up your lasagna noodle and add this deliciousness.

If you enjoy lasagna you really need to try my lasagna recipe without ricotta cheese.

Prepare the ingredients

ingredients on a cutting board for a spaghetti meat sauce

When you choose your ingredients at the store you want to remember to buy the best ingredients that you can afford. The garlic and onions should be firm to the touch.

When buying the crushed tomatoes and sauce try to buy the ones that come in a glass jar or at least have a BPA free lining.

Chop the onions

Get yourself a sharp knife and cutting board to chop up some onion.

I used a large yellow onion for this recipe but you could absolutely use a sweet onion or add more onions than I used. The only onions I probably would not use for this type of dish would be shallots or red onions.

Ever gut frustrated with trying to peel an onion? Check out how to peel an onion.

Chop the garlic

I use 3 cloves for this recipe. You want to chop the garlic pretty small or even mince them to get some great flavor throughout the sauce. If you really like garlic don’t be afraid to add as much as you like!

Ground beef

You want to pull your ground beef out of the fridge and cut it up getting it ready for the frying pan.

Don’t just dump the whole chunk of beef in the pan. You want it to be broken up in pieces so the moisture pulls away from the meat helping with the browning process.

It is important to make sure that your ground beef has not gone bad.

Extra Virgin olive oil

I use this oil because it has a high smoke point and it is by far the healthiest oil to cook with.

If you can you want to get a first pressed or at the very least an expeller-pressed or cold-pressed olive oil. Stay away from the vegetable oils if, at all possible, they really are bad stuff.

Brown the ground beef

ground beef being cooked in a frying pan

One of the things that really makes this dish shine is the browning of the ground beef it brings great flavor to the sauce.

I like the ground beef cooked in bigger chunks rather than minced ground beef. If your buying grass-fed beef it typically comes in a square shape that I cut up into 9 or so cubed pieces.

Add olive oil to a big frying pan that you have heated up on medium heat. You want to get it hot enough that the oil is not smoking but it is very fluid on the pan.

Add the ground beef to the pan and spread it out. Having gaps around the pieces will allow the beef to brown better.

Don’t move the beef around, just let it brown on one side. After it is browned well go ahead and move them around in the pans so the ground beef gets browned on all sides.

After the beef is pretty well cooked through and nice and browned, take the ground beef out of the pan and put it to the side.

Saute the onions and garlic

In the same pan that you cooked the ground beef in you want to add the onions and garlic. We are using the same pan so we can get all the flavor from the ground beef being cooked.

Saute them in the pan until you get the onions translucent and the garlic gives the incredible smell from being cooked.

If you don’t have enough fat left from the beef in the pan and the onions and garlic are burning go ahead and add a little more oil to the pan.

Add some salt and pepper to the pan and stir it all in.

Add the sauce and simmer

Deglaze

After the onions are soft and mostly translucent add a little bit of the canned sauce to the pan. The goal with this is to deglaze the pan and get all those dark bits and flavor into the sauce. This will add incredible flavor to the spaghetti meat sauce.

Add the remaining can of sauce.

Ground beef

Add the ground beef that you set aside back to the pan. You want to mix this around to make sure that the beef gets fully covered with sauce.

Crushed tomatoes

Add the can of crushed tomatoes, carefully adding this to the pan because it is going to want to splatter.

Add salt, pepper, and Italian seasoning. After you get all the ingredients in, turn the burner down to a simmer and cover it.

Now, depending on how runny the sauce was in the cans you bought will determine how long you will want to simmer.

You are looking for a thicker sauce that will stick to the pasta that you cooked.

Sample the sauce to see if it needs any more seasoning. At the very least it most likely will need some more salt.

If your sauce is runny learn how to thicken pasta sauce.

Serve

Yes. the best part we have been waiting for, time to eat. Hopefully, you cooked your favorite spaghetti or pasta to add to the best spaghetti meat sauce recipe that you have ever created!

Add your spaghetti to a plate and cover it with the meat sauce. If you are a fan of Parmesan then add some fresh grated to the top of the spaghetti. And remember there is only one Parmesan and it is what the Italians use. It is only made in Italy… Parmigiano-Reggiano.

Looking for some other Pasta Recipes

Try my american chop suey

If you are in a pinch and you need to stretch your sauce then you can add water. Alternatively, if you have some tomato paste you could use that with the added water and mix it together really well.

The tomato paste is a concentrated version of the tomato sauce and the water will help balance it. Another option would be to add some grated cheese with the water and tomato paste and the cheese will help thicken the sauce.

You can absolutely add spaghetti sauce for a pizza sauce. You might need to reduce the sauce by simmering it a bit if it is to runny of a sauce. You want to also buy a sauce with the least amount of ingredients, this typically will be more aligned with what a typical pizza sauce tastes like.