Cold pan, all the oil, medium heat. It is more oil than looks right in an empty pan, and that is the point. This is not a slick to stop things sticking, it is half the finished sauce. Warm it until it loosens and thins and you can smell it, green and a little peppery. The smell is the signal. Push it past that and you cook the flavor out of the one ingredient you came here for.

All at once, and stand back. Cold tomato hitting hot oil will spit. Listen for a hard continuous sizzle rather than a polite one. That noise is water leaving the pan, and water leaving is the entire recipe.

Salt now, not at the end. Salt early pulls water out of the tomato so it can go. A sauce salted at the end tastes like tomato with salt on it. A sauce salted at the start tastes seasoned all the way through.

Keep the heat high enough that it never stops bubbling. Stir often and watch the color move from bright red to a deeper brick as the water goes and the sugar concentrates. Smell is your second read. Raw tomato is sharp and slightly green, cooked tomato turns round and sweet. When the sharpness is gone you are close.

Now the finish, and you cannot miss it once you know it. Early on the oil sits in orange pools on the surface. Then it stops separating. Drag a spoon through the middle of the pan and watch the track. If it fills in instantly the sauce is still water. When the track holds for a beat before it closes, the oil has gone into the tomato and you are done.

That is an emulsion, and it is the same thing that happens when you mount a pan sauce with cold butter. The fat here is the olive oil, and it is doing the job that an hour of simmering would otherwise have to do. This is why two ingredients can taste like a Sunday.

Taste. Adjust salt. Nothing else goes in.

Salt the water until it tastes like something. Start it when the passata goes in, and the two will finish together.

Pull the pasta a minute before the box says. It is going to finish in the sauce, and a noodle that arrives already cooked has nothing left to give.

Move the drained pasta straight into the pan with a spoonful of its cooking water.

Toss hard for thirty seconds. The starch in that water is what makes the sauce grip the noodle instead of sliding off it.

Tear the basil over the top, and do it at the last second. The clock starts the moment a leaf is opened, so basil torn early and left waiting on the board is already going dark by the time it reaches the plate.

Finish with a last drizzle of the Everyday and serve immediately.