I had plenty of onions, carrots & celery. Hmmmm.... lime & lemon peel. Well, I’m gonna need to get those. The pandemic has made grocery shopping very different and also kind of cool! We found a local, organic farm to get fruit & veg delivered weekly, so I added those items to the next week’s order. Done! Also highly recommended! These farms often fill orders with other fruit & veg they purchase in winter when they can’t grow the produce, so you still have a nice variety year round.
Next ingredient: whole milk. Well, I don’t have that on hand, but I can add it to my weekly milk order! (Anyone seeing a pattern?) I’ve pined after Smith Brother’s weekly milk delivery service for years. I’d see the milk trucks drive by and think “that’d be cool.” It’s expensive, I mean like twice as expensive as I normally pay for organic milk. So, I could never quite justify the added expense. Well, pandemic life made me reprioritize and, honestly, we’re spending a ton less on gas so why not try it? The milk is local and gets to you within a couple days after leaving the farm and is killer! Is it worth how much extra it is? I’m just going to go with “la, la, la, la... I can’t see the price” and enjoy it while we’re staying home as much as we can. Added whole milk to the next week’s order.
Everything else was in my pantry or fridge including a very hard chunk of Parmesan rind that I’ve been saving to use in a soup. So, perfect recipe to make! I also love a good Bolognese and this reminded me of that kind of slow cooking, delicious sauce.
The ingredients arrived and it was time to start! I knew it would be a long day of cooking, so I started early. This sauce was a bit of an adventure. It’s simple, but takes time to develop all the flavors. But first, I took time to write out the recipe step by step, because I absolutely hate having to read & re-read paragraphs to figure what to do next in the middle of cooking. Clearly, a post recipe rewrite nap was in order afterwards. You should schedule a little pre-cooking nap, too!
First things first, brown the pork and beef. So, thinking I’ll have at least 15 minutes to prep all the other ingredients, I decided to jump in and start browning the beef. What I forgot was, I’m not fast at prepping other ingredients and this plan would fall apart quickly. While browning the beef, I got the onion, carrots, and celery out. Scrub, scrub, scrub. Stir the beef. Chop the onions. Stir the beef. Chop some more. Stir again and suddenly realize that with my distraction of trying to prep the veg that I’d inadvertently over browned the beef. Not burnt, but a bit too dark and probably not all that far from burnt. Well, it seemed ok, so I decided to go with it and hope it didn’t affect the final sauce too much. At this point, I turned off the burner and stopped to actually prep the rest of the ingredients.
Back to the pork. Browned it and set it aside. Now she has you add the soffritto (onions, carrots, celery) to the Dutch oven and cover with olive oil using at least 3/4 cup of additional oil and cook on medium high for 25 minutes.
This temperature seemed a bit high, but I wanted to trust her techniques, so I left it up higher than I thought it should be. Overall, it worked really well. I would turn the temp down just a touch next time, but not much. The soffritto did get to a nice deep brown color, but I think maybe I let it get a bit too dark.
Time to turn it up to high, add the meat back to the pan & add the red wine. I used merlot from an open bottle that I had in the fridge. I’m not sure this was the best choice, I’d probably go with a Cabernet Sauvignon or something similar next time. I think the flavor would blend better. Scraped all the yummy browned bits off of the bottom of the pan. I added the stock, milk, bay leaves, zests, cinnamon, tomato paste & Parmesan (but didn’t stir it yet.) The next step was grate 10 zips of nutmeg into the pan, so I grabbed the nutmeg, the micrograter and added it. At this point it almost looked like the milk that was still floating on top had cooked at the high temp & I swear it smelled like sour milk. I needed to add salt and pepper to taste, which meant I should taste it. Pro tip: wait for it to cool enough before tasting or you, too, may end up with a picture like this of running cold water on your tongue.
Well... I can’t say that it tasted bad, but it didn’t exactly taste good. This made it hard to figure out how much salt and pepper, so I added a few hearty pinches of salt and maybe a tsp of pepper. I figured I could adjust it later when it hopefully tasted better.
After simmering for 40 minutes and letting the milk break down, it was time to tweak the taste and season again before the next long cook. At this point, the flavor was blending together a little bit, but I still wasn’t convinced this would be edible. I added a little more tomato paste, wine and more salt & pepper which seemed to improve the flavor. Now to simmer for another couple hours on the lowest setting possible. Stir, skim oil, stir, skim oil, repeat.
Finally, the sauce is done! One final adjustment to salt & pepper and it was ready! I tossed 2 cups of sauce and 4 tablespoons of butter with 1 lb of cooked spaghetti. The verdict? It was good. It had a nice deep flavor and we enjoyed it, but neither me nor my husband thought it was great. So, it will live in our “good - could use some tweaking” recipe folder. We thought it did taste a little better the next day, so extra time letting the flavors blend seemed helpful.
Where it went wrong. I think the overly browned beef and soffritto made the sauce a little too dark in flavor. A different wine might improve the flavor a bit and maybe quickly stirring in the milk would help, too. Since I absolutely love a Bolognese that cooks all day, I was a bit disappointed. I assumed I would love this sauce. It’s possible it’s just not my sauce or that I need to work on it a bit more.
It is not an overly complex recipe, so if you have the ingredients you should absolutely give this one a try. Prep all your ingredients before you start and you can just walk through the recipe each time your timer goes off for the next step. Just know you should start this early in the day if you want it for dinner.
Happy Cooking!
Kerry
Next up! Patty is making Chicken With Vinegar on P. 336. A fascinating cooking method. I can't wait to hear how this turns out! And... will she find another Little Bird? The suspense is killing me!
P.S. Did you read the fat chapter Cindy told us about earlier in the week?
P.P.S. Neither did I! Shhh.... don't tell Cindy, but you should really go read that. I will too! There's good stuff to learn and that's what this is all about. Good food and learning cool new things!
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