Sunday Sauce with Meatballs and Sausage

Sunday sauce is a thick and hearty homemade marinara sauce loaded with meatballs and sausage. Simple ingredients cook slowly and transform into an ultra flavorful main dish your family will crave. It’s a perfect meal to serve a crowd!

Most days I have a strong feeling that this sauce is what’s running through my veins.

Do you have a meal from your childhood that embodies all things love, tradition, and family? Sunday sauce is that dish for me.

On Sundays I’d hang around the house attempting to do my homework, inhaling the smell of this sauce simmering away on the stove top all afternoon. Eventually my homework would be done and I’d celebrate by eating my weight in sauce, meatballs, sausage, pasta, cheese, crusty bread…you know, Italian food’s heavy hitters.

We affectionately call our sauce ‘Sunday sauce’ because it takes several hours to make. This is not a very weeknight-friendly recipe. It’s the perfect type of recipe for those days you’re hanging around the house and can keep a periodic eye on the pot bubbling away on the stove.

The good news is that while this sauce takes time to make, the active time is pretty minimal.

Sunday sauce ingredients

There are three main components to Sunday sauce: meatballs, sausage, and the hearty marinara sauce.

The sauce consists of very basic ingredients, but pure magic happens as it simmers on the stove over the course of an afternoon. It simmers, thickens, and develops such a deep, rich flavor. Definitely a 'whole greater than the sum of its parts' situation, you know?

For the sauce you'll need:

• crushed tomatoes
• olive oil
• onions
• garlic cloves
• dried oregano
• fresh basil

Technically that's all you need for a delicious pot of sauce, but I like to add meatballs and sausage to round out a full meal. All you need is to boil up a pot of pasta, make a salad, and you have enough food to serve a large (ten or so) crowd.

Step-by-step instructions

What I like to do is start by getting the sauce going before I move on to cooking the meat.

The first step is to sauté the onions, then add garlic. Stir that up with the crushed tomatoes, oregano, and basil and let everything simmer. Simple ingredients, simple steps.

Once that begins to simmer, it's time for the meat.

Now everyone has different preferences when it comes to meatballs, but I always bake them. It's easier, it's healthier, and there's no questions about when they'll be cooked through.

Psst - while I always go for beef here, these Italian baked turkey meatballs are a reader (and family) favorite!

My meatball mixture consists of ground beef, Parmesan cheese, eggs, breadcrumbs, parsley, salt, and pepper, and you'll want to mix everything together until just combined. I like to get in there with my hands for this part to ensure things don't get overmixed.

You can stop there and have an amazing meal of pasta, meatballs, and sauce, OR you can do what I do and add some sausage to the mix.

To do so, arrange one pack of Italian sausages (mild, hot, sweet...whatever your preference) on a large rimmed baking sheet along with the meatballs. Cook for forty minutes, then add the meatballs and sausage to the pot of simmering sauce.

Let the sauce simmer for another hour or two, stirring everything up now and then, and you're all set. Lots of hands-off time here.

What makes this sauce magic?

Answer: time.

While the sauce will be fairly thin at the start, over the next two to three hours it'll thicken into a wonderfully hearty marinara sauce that blows away anything you can find in a jar.

You'll want to use a very large pot so it doesn't splatter all over your cook top, and/or place a large lid or splatter screen over top.

If you're using a lid, leave it open a crack so the steam can escape. Trapping too much steam in there slows down the thickening which is essential to this sauce. One time I used my splatter screen instead of a lid and found it didn't let enough steam filter through. Just FYI.

And that's that! Stir it up every now and then to ensure the sauce along the bottom of the pot doesn't burn, then serve over your favorite pasta once it has thickened to your liking.

Spaghetti is an obvious choice, but we love tube pastas all the same. Most any shape would do, just probably not something small like elbows, orzo, pastina, etc.

There are many, many other sauce recipes on the Internet. They run the gamut from using plenty of extra ingredients like bay leaves, wine, or fancier cuts of meat to those that cook literally all day.

Some would even say it was blasphemous that this was called 'sauce' at all. <-- we're a 'sauce' family in the sauce vs. gravy standoff, if you couldn't tell. 😉

But while I'm absolutely biased, I love that this particular Sunday sauce recipe keeps things really as simple as they can be. It has easily accessible ingredients and a method that doesn't require a lot of hands-on time or tricky steps. And it's total comfort food, to boot.

Recipe notes

• Cover the pot of sauce with a lid left open a crack as it simmers to cut down on splatter drops hitting your stove top. Be sure enough steam can escape, as that helps this Sunday sauce thicken beautifully.
• I like to cut each Italian sausage in half after they've been cooked and before adding them to the pot of sauce. I find that's easier when serving a crowd, as it's less daunting if people want to eat both meatballs and sausage.