One of my favorite food is pasta. I could eat pasta for every meal and not blink. I actually did just that when I worked at a restaurant called Wienstein and Gavinos. Of course, I gained a few pounds from that job!
The following recipe is nothing complicated. If you cannot get ground veal where you are at, no worries, just sub in ground beef. Try to use beef chuck and pork shoulder for this recipe.
Photo by sabotrax of Flickr fame
Meat Sauce
Yeilds 4 L sauce
Ingredients:
- 60 mL (1/4 cup) extra-virgin olive oil
- 1 onion, peeled, chopped fine
- 1 carrot, peeled, chopped fine
- 1 rib celery, chopped fine
- 1 Kg (2 lbs) lean ground beef
- 500 g (1 lb) lean ground pork
- 500 g (1 lb) lean ground veal
- 5 cloves garlic, peeled, minced
- 250 mL (1 cup) milk
- 224 mL (8 oz can) tomato paste
- 3 x 828 mL (3 x 28 oz cans) diced tomatoes
- handful dried oregano
- handful dried thyme
- handful dried basil
- To taste salt
- To taste pepper
Method:
- Sweat onion, carrot and celery in olive oil over medium heat until soft.
- Add ground meats and cook until browned slightly.
- Add garlic, cook for one minute to soften flavor.
- Add tomato paste with two cans of the diced tomatoes. (Reserve one for later.)
- Bring to a boil, reduce heat, simmer for one hour.
- Blend mixture with a hand bender to coarsly chop up the bigger chunks of meat.
- Add remaining can of diced tomatoes, oregano, thyme and basil.
- Simmer for 30 minutes.
- Adjust seasoning with salt and pepper.
As you can see, this will make a lot. The trick here is to remember that this will take a while. Slow food, if you will. The good news is that this will make a lot of sauce, so you can freeze it into portions.
You may have noticed that there are some things missing from this sauce as compared to others, and one strange ingredient: milk!
Milk will help to tenderize the meat as it cooks, giving you a silky, smooth sauce. It will also help with the mouth-feel of the final sauce.
Do not put sugar in your sauce. I counter the acidity of the tomatoes with the carrots and the slow simmering of the sauce. This is natural cooking, and I hate it when meat sauce tastes like candy.
Bacon, mushrooms and the like? They are fine to add to a pasta dish before you add the meat sauce. There is no reason for them to be in the base sauce, and they will not freeze well. You want something as a base for adding later, and the point of adding pancetta or mushrooms is to have the flavor. Freezers are notorious for destroying subtle flavors, so get the most out of your expensive ingredients, add them jsut before you heat up the sauce.
This is also the reason you do not see any fresh herbs in my sauce. The fresh herbs go in at the END of cooking, or their flavor is lost. This means that I will heat my garlic, add my sauce, then toss it into the pasta. Toss with parmesan, then the fresh herbs. After a few seconds, the oils in the herbs release their flavors, then it is time to serve.
