Make Jarred Pasta Sauce Creamy With One Extra Ingredient

A delicious pasta dinner on a weeknight can help raise your spirits and perhaps even make the weekend seem a little bit closer. However, building a pasta sauce from scratch (to say nothing of the cleanup afterward) can be a daunting prospect. The alternative is jarred pasta sauce, but it rarely wins awards for flavor compared to the homemade stuff. Instead of having it as-is, why not upgrade that jarred sauce? With just one ingredient you may already have at home, you can easily transform it a luxurious and creamy version of its old self.

A dollop of cream cheese can do exactly that. That's all you may need to make that quick pasta dish taste like something that took much longer to make. Pasta made with jarred tomato sauce and cream cheese marries all the classic tangy, savory, creamy, and herby flavors beloved in more time-intensive meals into a dish that just can't go wrong. This trick also works with vegan cream cheese if you need to cut out dairy.

Even better, this trick requires hardly any extra effort, as it all comes together in about the time it takes you to boil the pasta. Of course, it also helps if you start with a good base, like the jarred pasta sauce Ina Garten keeps in her pantry. Depending on how motivated you are, you can further upgrade this creamy, tangy pasta dish with a quick bake to take it up a notch further. 

This is essentially a one-pot pasta dish since you can bring everything together in the same pot you use for boiling pasta. However, it's a good idea to save some of that starchy pasta water to adjust the dish's consistency and help combine the cream cheese with the sauce. Just about any cream cheese works here, whether it's plain or flavored, while you can further enhance or balance the flavors with a sprinkle of oregano and dried chili flakes. The cheesy pasta sauce will also thicken as it cools down, so you may wish to thin out the sauce with some pasta water before serving.

With a few more simple steps, you can upgrade this dish significantly by baking it. Simply transfer the pasta, sauce, and cream cheese mixture into an oven-proof dish, top with bread crumbs, grated Parmigiano, and some olive oil. Then, bake until the top is brown and crispy. The additional texture and deeper flavors from the bake are worth the extra time, and the oven does most of the work anyway. 

Remember to add some more pasta water before baking to keep the sauce runny as it will lose moisture in the oven. If you plan on baking, you can even use pizza sauce, since one of the main differences between pizza and pasta sauces is that the former is meant to be cooked while the latter comes pre-cooked. And in a pinch, canned soups also make delicious pasta sauces.