How Swapping Butter For Cream Will Impact Your Pasta Sauce

Pasta sauce is extremely versatile, and everyone seems to have their own version of it. For a marinara sauce, the base is tomatoes, but after that, you can add whatever you like according to your preference, making the sauce a simple yet highly popular kitchen staple. Tomato sauce has been around for over 300 years since its appearance in the Italian cookbook "Lo Scalco alla Moderna" from Antonio Latini in 1692 (via Paesana).

A simple pasta sauce may consist of tomatoes — either canned or fresh (peeled and cooked down) — olive oil, garlic, onion, and other spices. Some popular additions are red wine, sugar, oregano, basil, and vegetables. A fun way to take your pasta sauce up a notch is adding cream. Putting half-and-half or heavy cream into your sauce makes it rich, pretty-colored, and creamy. However, there's something else that might suit your taste better: butter.

If you've spent any time cooking, you have surely found that butter is essential in the kitchen — and for good reason. It's naturally creamy and a great source of fat, which is often needed when preparing foods. The best part is that it's usually on hand because who wouldn't keep a hefty supply of butter in the kitchen?

Thanks to all of its wonderful qualities, butter is the perfect addition to any pasta sauce, especially as a replacement for cream. The reason is that the fat in butter helps to calm the acidity of tomatoes, onions, and any other ingredients you've added. Also, since butter is usually salted, it tends to help other flavors shine rather than cover them up. One of the purposes of using salt in cooking is to enhance other flavors. On top of all those excellent reasons to use butter instead of cream is the velvety texture it gives your sauce without thinning it out like cream can. There are many types of pasta sauces – and all can be improved with butter.