This Easy Tomato Cream Sauce takes less than 10 minutes to prepare and is a great alternative to store-bought sauce. Toss with your favorite cooked pasta for a quick and easy meal!
I was not feeling my usual excitement around cooking the day I came up with this recipe. That changed quickly after this sauce came to the rescue.
I had a package of cheese tortellini from Costco in my fridge and decided I’d take the easy way out and just toss it with some store bought marinara and call it a day. Great idea, right? My plans were quickly dashed as I peered into my pantry and there was no marinara sauce to be found.
This Easy Tomato Cream Sauce is one of those pantry staple recipes that ends up being a lifesaver time and time again. I always have fresh or dry pasta on hand and I regularly stock all of the rest of the ingredients. That makes this recipe a great fallback choice when you need something quick and satisfying.
How to Make Easy Tomato Cream Sauce
Grab a 12-inch skillet, add a couple of tablespoons of olive oil and place it over medium heat.
Add some diced onion and garlic, and cook, stirring, for 2 to 3 minutes.
Add a can of diced tomatoes, tomato sauce, Italian Seasoning, basil, sugar, salt, and black pepper and stir well to combine. Want to make it spicy? Add a little (or a lot!) of crushed red pepper.
Add a little heavy cream and finely grated Parmesan and cook for another minute or two until the sauce is warmed through and bubbly.
And that my friends, is it!
Luscious, velvety, flavorful Tomato Cream Sauce.
How to Serve this Versatile Sauce
Cook up your pasta of choice, add the sauce, and toss to combine. Add some fresh basil if you’ve got any on hand and garnish the finished dish with additional Parmesan.
- Toss with cheese tortellini or any cooked pasta you love
- Layer it into lasagna
- Toss it with cooked meatballs (like these Italian Turkey Meatballs) for a delicious spin on spaghetti and meatballs
- Load saucy meatballs and provolone cheese on toasted hoagie rolls for an easy meatball sub
- Use as substitute for marinara sauce in any recipe (like Lazy Lasagna Casserole, Skillet Chicken Parmesan, or Chicken Pesto Lasagna Rollups
A simple salad and a loaf of bread is all you need to round out this meatless meal.
And, a glass of red wine wouldn’t hurt the situation one bit.
Easy Tomato Cream Sauce
Ingredients
- 2 tablespoons olive oil
- ½ cup diced sweet yellow onion
- 1 teaspoon minced garlic
- 14.5 ounce can diced tomatoes
- 15 ounce can tomato sauce
- ½ teaspoon Italian seasoning
- ½ teaspoon dried basil
- ½ teaspoon sugar
- ½ teaspoon salt
- ¼ teaspoon crushed red pepper, or to taste (optional)
- freshly ground black pepper, to taste
- ½ cup heavy cream
- ½ cup finely shredded Parmesan, plus more for serving
- fresh basil, for serving (optional)
Instructions
- Heat olive oil in a 12-inch saute pan over MEDIUM-LOW heat. Add onion and garlic and cook, stirring occasionally, for 2 to 3 minutes, or until onion has softened and is translucent. Add the diced tomatoes, tomato sauce, Italian Seasoning, basil, sugar, salt, crushed red pepper (if using) and black pepper and stir well to combine. Add cream and Parmesan and cook until warmed through and bubbly, 1 to 2 minutes.
- Toss with the cooked pasta of your choice and garnish with basil, if desired.
Video
Nutrition
Nutrition information is automatically calculated using generic ingredients, and is an estimate not a guarantee. For more accurate results, please refer to the labels on your ingredients at home.
Do you drain the can of tomatoes or include the juice? Thank you!
Undrained with the juice!
This recipe is family approved. Even by my pickiest eater. It’s not to heavy either, light and flavorful. I made it with bow tie pasta and turkey meatballs on the side. And it was pretty low cost as well. This is definitely going into rotation
This recipe was easy and delicious!! My entire family of 6 enjoyed it. Didn’t have cream on hand so used cream cheese instead and turned out great!
Could this be refrigerated and reheated later?
Sure!
I will try this recipe this week. I just had a question about the sweetness from the sugar. Does the sauce taste sweet or does the sugar just help balance out the acidity from the tomatoes? I’m not interested in a sweet sauce and wondering if it would still be good if i left out the sugar. Thank you.
I only add a small amount of sugar to help balance the acid in the tomatoes. It shouldn’t be a sweet sauce. I recommend tasting it and adding sugar at the end, if needed.
Hi…I’m going to try this recipe tonight. I have a lot of tomatoes in my garden. Could I substitute fresh tomatoes for the can of diced?
Hi Luanne. So sorry I missed your question! I’ve never tried this recipe with fresh tomatoes. There is quite a bit of liquid in canned diced tomatoes so the texture could end up being a bit thicker if you use fresh. If you tried it, I’d love to hear how it worked out for you.
LOVE this tomato sauce! So creamy and delicious without the acidity of so many tomato sauces. And it’s not hard to make – no hours and hours in the kitchen. I would double it though if serving a group. Thanks Valerie for sharing this!
I made this for my grandkids. They don’t care for any tomato chunks in their sauce so I puréed the sauce until totally smooth. They ate it with a French baguette as
a soup!! It didn’t last long. Next time I will have to double the recipe. It was so yummy!
This was a really good cream sauce recipe, one of the best I’ve tasted. It’s a keeper!
This recipe is so flavorful and so simple to make. This will definitely be regular feature at my house. The only thing I may do different is to use crushed tomatoes instead of diced tomatoes just for the appearance. Thanks for the recipe
I’d love to try this out. One question I have is about the tomato sauce ingredient. What tomato sauce are you using? Are you using something that’s un-seasoned or are you using a pre-seasoned sauce? Thanks
I use plain, unseasoned tomato sauce.
This looks amazing! We only have two cans of diced tomatoes will that work instead of diced and tomato sauce?
You won’t get a nice creamy consistency without the tomato sauce. You could try pureeing one of the cans of diced tomatoes in a food processor or blender for a similar result.