You don’t put a lot of sugar you just put enough to cut the acidity.
Ideally the correct amount is just enough that it works, but you don’t actually taste the sugar
I understand. But in most commercial preparations you can definitely taste it. And I’ll confess as a kid my mother would feed us Chef Boy-ar-Dee canned raviolis. That stuff you could put a stick in, freeze it, and make popsicles.
When using fresh tomatoes from the garden you don’t need the sugar.
When using fresh tomatoes from the garden you don’t need the sugar.
I use authentic San Marzano whole peeled tomatoes, usually a 96 oz. can from Wegmans, added to three six oz. cans of good tomato paste. I fry the tomato paste in olive oil, after browning the garlic and spices, until the paste is slightly caramelized before adding the tomatoes. Even as sweet as the San Marzanos are, I still need to add sugar, which I buffer with 1/2 teaspoon of lime juice. The advantage of making sauce in such a large quantity is that it tastes much better over the next few days after cooling in the refrigerator. I am not sure why, but it always does.
In my experience, canned tomatoes are not always predictable in ripeness or acidity due to brand variation or a less than predictable quality of Athena batch of tomatoes that were processed at the cannery. Therefore you can slavishly follow a recipe, even down to the brand of tomatoes, and still have a batch of sauce that is more acidic than you want. In this circumstance, added sugar in moderation can be useful to tame or mask the acidity.