The recipe just calls for tomato sauce, reg. spaghetti sauce type spices, etc. I’d like more beef based with some tomato notes for mine. Any ideas how to get this?? Yeah, I’m bastardizing braciole, but it’s what we’d like.
Put a piece of chuck steak or a shank bone (with meat on it) in your tomato sauce and let it simmer for a few hours. Scrape the marrow out of the bone and stir it into the sauce. The meat you can either shred and leave in or take out and use for hash or whatever. Then go ahead with whatever else you were going to do with the sauce.
Just doing the above with a puree of tomatoes, onion, garlic, S&P (and NO OTHER herbs or spices) yields Creole daube, a delicious New Orleans Italian immigrant dish when served over pasta. My dear old grandpapa, who was neither Italian or had any connection with New Orleans, called it “tomato gravy.”
You could get some woody mushrooms, like porcini, a tin of anchovies, and some worcestershire sauce blend it all together and chuck it in the sauce and that will add loads of meatiness.