You can use freshly diced tomatoes if you like. Roma tomatoes are one of the best varieties for pasta. Fresh tomatoes hold a lot of water so they might make your sauce a little thinner, but you can easily reduce it by cooking it for longer or adding a little extra flour to thicken the sauce.

You can add a teaspoon of hot sauce early on to add some heat to your sauce. Unless you’re using an extremely hot sauce, a teaspoon won’t be enough to make the sauce overly spicy.

We highly recommend that you use a cheese or chicken ravioli for this recipe. Rana makes a beautiful four-cheese ravioli (or, in Italian, quattro formaggio) that is great for this sauce. It tastes awesome and you end up with SIX varieties of cheese in your dinner.

We strongly encourage you to grate your Parmesan cheese from a block. This has two benefits. Firstly, freshly grated cheese melts more quickly than packaged cheese as it has a greater surface area-to-volume ratio. This increases its rate of reaction and causes the cheese to melt more quickly. Secondly, it tastes much better!

If you can get it, authentic Italian parmigiano-reggiano is a great way to really take your dinner to the next level. The real deal is only made in a small part of Italy, and has a deep, slightly sweet flavor that you just can’t replicate elsewhere. Try it if you can and taste the difference for yourself!

Use a box grater to grate your cheese. A high-quality box grater with a non-slip handle will make grating cheese - and many harder foods, like carrots - an absolute breeze. The risk of slipping and damaging yourself or your food is lower, and you can get precisely the amount of grated cheese you want simply by hand-grating the Parmesan yourself.