Although it seems simple, a humble batch of tomato sauce can be made in countless ways. The kind of tomato used, how long you simmer the sauce, which aromatics you choose to include (or exclude), and the addition of butter are just a few factors that can subtly but significantly influence its ultimate flavor.

Whether they create their own recipe or follow a well-known one, many home cooks and chefs have a signature sauce technique they rely on again and again. (One of the most famous renditions is Marcella Hazan’s Tomato Sauce with Onion and Butter.)

I find that straightforward tomato sauces with short, high-quality ingredient lists are often the best. If you’re looking for your own go-to recipe or need something more versatile than what you typically make, one actor, cookbook author, and Italian cuisine enthusiast just shared his simple tomato sauce recipe that meets all these criteria while still building layers of flavor.

It’s time to learn how to make tomato sauce just like Stanley Tucci.

Tucci has an easy hack for removing seeds from tomatoes

In a recent Instagram post, The Devil Wears Prada star starts making a fresh batch of sauce to use up some small cherry tomatoes he notes are close to going bad.

Instead of putting the tomatoes into the pan whole or painstakingly deseeding each one, he employs a simple trick: cut the tomatoes in half, place them in a bowl of water, and then squeeze the fruit. Tucci explains that “all the seeds come out.”

Sauté your aromatics and fresh tomatoes

After prepping the fresh tomatoes, Tucci sweats Tropea onions (a sweet red onion from Calabria), yellow onions, and garlic in a large pan with extra-virgin olive oil. He details that once the alliums have started to soften, “I’m going to take all these nice tomatoes and stick them right in there,” transferring his sliced cherry tomatoes from the water to the skillet.

He recommends generously salting the tomatoes and begins cooking them down in the pan. For this particular batch of sauce, Tucci breaks up the tough skins of the old tomatoes with a quick blitz from an immersion blender, but if you’re using fresh tomatoes with a more tender exterior, you can skip this step.

Add in canned tomatoes, too

Once the fresh ingredients begin to break down and cook, Tucci pours in two cans of whole, peeled Campania tomatoes. (He doesn’t specify what size cans to use, but they seem to be smaller, 14-ounce containers. You could alternatively use one large 28-ounce can.)

The actor adds a few torn leaves of fresh basil, another pinch of salt, and then begins crushing the whole tomatoes with a wooden spoon. He lets the sauce simmer on the stove, pointing out that you can simmer it with or without the lid; it’s entirely up to you. Leaving the lid off will likely lead to a more concentrated flavor as water evaporates.

Once the sauce has reached your desired texture, thickness, and depth of flavor, follow Tucci’s lead for finishing it. In addition to a drizzle of olive oil, he suggests to “add a little more basil, and that’s it, and it’s going to be really good.”

You can use this sauce for so much more than pasta

Thanks to the simple flavor profile of this recipe, Tucci emphasizes that “you can do whatever you want with this sauce. You can add shrimp to it. You can add peas to it. You can sauté a little guanciale and add that to it (or) a little pepperoncino… I make a batch all the time, and then I put it in the fridge, and I use it for different things.”

If you’ve followed the actor on Instagram for a while, you might recall that he’s previously made a quick lunch with his tomato sauce and some beans, or a weeknight pasta with canned tuna added to the sauce. Keep some in your own kitchen so you can eat like Tucci at a moment’s notice.