No matter your personal preferences when it comes to pasta, there's a sauce recipe out there to suit your palate, and most sauces are even better when homemade. If you usually use olive oil to cook and season your pasta sauces, another way to take it to the next level is to reach for the butter next time — here’s why.

Many chefs like to add a little bit of starchy pasta cooking water to a sauce to make it creamier and help it adhere to the noodles, but a knob of butter can do the job better. Tomato sauce is typically lower in fat, so some butter can help emulsify the sauce and prevent it from being too starchy or thin, making it creamy but still loose.

A little goes a long way with butter, but Italian cooking doyenne Marcella Hazan is famous for putting five tablespoons in her tomato sauce. "I have known people to skip the pasta and eat the sauce directly out of the pot with a spoon,” she says, but first, add a little at a time to your recipe to see what works best for you.