Spaghetti sauce.

Cafe Society
1

My spaghetti sauce is pretty dang good sometimes. I started out making it about 12 years ago. It’s probably now in about Version 8.3, at least.

In a really hot sauce pan (NOT non-stick), heat olive oil but not a ton. Dump in about a pound of cut up hot italian sausage and don’t move it too much – let it stick to the bottom of the pan. After a bit, add a cut-up onion, cook a little then add red pepper flakes, basil, thyme, oregano, rosemary (fresh is good, but not essential) and a few cloves of garlic, minced.

Mix it up a bit, browning the sausage on all sides, but don’t move it more than necessary. You want browned bits of sausage sticking to the bottom of the pan.

When the sausage is just done and the onions are somewhat softened, they go into a bowl. Deglaze with red wine and reduce a little. Then, a 28 oz can of tomatoes with the liquid, and some tomato paste get mixed in with the wine. When I’ve broken up all the tomatoes and reduced slightly (5-10 minutes), the sausage and onions and herbs go back in. About this time I add black pepper.

Now, I just let it finish to desired thickness (5-10). Salt to taste but with canned tomatoes and sausage, you don’t need a lot.

Serve with spaghetti and bread and a hearty wine (but not Syrah – I think it clashes, it tastes like you’re drinking butter).

10 minutes of prep time to cut up sausage and onion and garlic and herbs. 20+ minutes of cooking time.

I’ve tried it with more liquid and done long-simmering. But I think this faster technique is better.

Things that have been in and out in different versions: carrots, green peppers, red peppers, heavy cream, honey, ground beef, anise seed, vodka, fresh tomatoes, chicken stock. I can’t criticize any of them but I don’t like the texture of the peppers. Honey and carrots sweeten it a lot, so if that’s your bag, go ahead. Cream is nice sometimes and can give it a nice color. Stock is all right for diddling with the consistency. Fresh tomatoes make it quite different and there are usually different things I do with them.

I’m not a mushroom fan but you can probably work them in somewhere.

Sorry about lack of specificity. It ain’t baking a cake though.

How’s your sauce?

2

Not half as interesting as you one, Trunk. Shame about the Syrah clash, though. It’s my favourite.

One question, though. The sausage stuckiness factor. Am I to scrape these of the bottom of the pan or will the fact that bits are stuck there add the flavour in itself? Or do they come off when you add the tomatoes? You really insist on this one, but I can’t quite see how it works out.

3

I dumped the sausage and onions out of the pan into a bowl. The little bits are stuck ot the pan. When I said “deglaze with wine” I mean to pour the wine into the pan, and when you do scrape up the little brown bits. That makes a little strong wine mixture with sausage bits, some herbs, some oil, maybe stuck onion that it really really flavorful. Then, I add the tomatoes to that.

A lot of folks like Syrah. It all tastes buttery to me, though, and when I have it with something acidic (I think that’s the clash), its even moreso.

I prefer Chianti with this meal. There’s actually a white that I have with it that I like.

4

Interesting and fast recipe. May try it someday. Can I open the proverbial can of worms[no, not for the recipe] and say that when I make this it’ll be called gravy, as opposed to sauce?

5

Put worms in it too if you want.

I don’t know the difference between “sauce” and “gravy”. I honestly always thought “gravy” was like a south philly goombah thing. It’s not like either word is exactly italian, right?

I don’t know if this would be called a “marinara” a “ragu” an “american bastardization that is nothing resembling anything anyone in Italy ever cooked in the history of the world” or something else.

It is kind of close to a “fra diavolo” dish that I think is Italian.

6

Your recipe sounds pretty good, Trunk. I’ve been getting bored with my own sauce, so I think I’ll give yours a try. Couple of questions, though…

Would regular Italian sausage work as well, or is there something special about the hot kind? And how small do I cut it up?

(And for the record, my south-Philly-native SO calls it sauce. :slight_smile: )

7

Does it actually get saucy after so little time cooking? I’ve tried similar recipes and it’s still just raw tomatoes in my mind after 25 minutes.

8

My fiancée (a Main Line Philly girl from an Italian fambly) eats her pasta in “sauce”, but when Nanny makes Italian meatballs, they’re in “gravy”, even though the gravy is red and made from tomatoes and spices. I asked her to explain the difference, and she couldn’t, really. When Nanny pours the same substance over pasta, it’s “sauce,” by the way.

I think this is a localized thing, possibly an artifact of neighborhoods that always spoke Italian, and when they converted to English, adpoted a different translation than most others… but I honestly have no idea.

9

Your recipe is nearly identical to mine. Love Italian sausage. I use hot, rather than sweet, and eliminate the red pepper flakes. I also like to add in a small pinch of cinnamon. Not too much, or it will take over the dish.

Here’s another you might try:

1/2 pound of bacon
1 onion, halved and sliced very thin
2-3 cloves of garlic, minced
olive oil
28 oz can tomatoes, diced
red pepper flakes

Fresh basil, chopped
ground pepper

Slice the bacon across the grain into 1/4" julienne pieces. Heat some olive oil and fry the bacon until just crisp. Drain most of the fat from the pan, but leave enough to saute the onions. Saute the onions until just tender, return the bacon to the pan, add the tomatoes, garlic and red pepper flakes.

Cover the pan and simmer for one hour. At the end, add the basil and top with fresh ground pepper.

10

The last spaghetti sauce I made turned out pretty good. It’s pretty much your basic bolognese.:

Take one onion, one carrot, and one stalk of celery, all finely chopped and cook in a little olive oil until the onion is soft. Add some minced garlic and stir for a minute or so, then add 1 pound of ground beef. Stir and break up the meat into small pieces until well browned. Then add a 28-oz can of diced tomatoes (with the liquid), 1 cup of beef stock, 1 cup of white wine, a light grating of nutmeg, and a couple of bay leaves. Simmer, covered, for 1/2 hour or so, then uncover and continue to simmer until it’s as thick as you like it. Add salt and pepper to taste and mix in a little chopped parsley.

11

I forgot to mention: 2 tablespoons of tomato paste, added after the meat is browned. Stir it in for a couple of minutes before adding the other ingredients.

It may sound bland, because of a lack of herbs and spices, but the reduced wine and stock really give it a lot of flavour.

12

I can answer this. Sweet Italian sausage works just fine in a recipe like this. Better, in fact, since you can control the heat of the dish by adding more or less red pepper. Or leave it out all together, if you wish.

I usually just cut up the sausage in bite-sized pieces (if frozen). If it’s fresh or thawed, remove the casing and use your fingers to make the pieces. I usually remove the casing only because I don’t like it in the dish.

By the way, for commercially sold Italian sausage, it’s hard to beat Johnsonville. It has a healthy proportion of fennel and spices. Most packaged sausage is completely tasteless.

13

[ bolding mine ]
So much innuendo…so little time.
:smiley:

Italian cuisine is a family favorite around here. No idea why, since we all seem to be of Indian or Irish descent.

Beth’s July* sauce

Onion
fresh thyme, oregano, basil, garlic (all out of my herb garden)
As many fresh tomatoes as you need to feed however many you’re serving(from Grand-daddy Houston’s garden)
a good red table wine, not too sweet, not too dry
Mushrooms
a dash DASH! of cloves
Italian sausage, lean ground beef, whatever floats your boat as meat goes

If I make meatballs or use sausage, I cook them first, then I remove them from the pan and add the onion and garlic. Cook until clearing, then add the wine. Scape. Lean over and sniff it. Take a drink of wine right from the bottle. Add of the peeled, seeded, chopped tomatoes. Reduce heat, simmer until done, then roughly puree 3/4 of this mixture. Drink more wine while pushing the buttons on the blender. Recombine. Add herbs, dash of cloves, mushrooms. Simmer until 'shrooms are done. Imbibe more wine. Add in meatballs. Simmer until the water content is reduced to your liking. I like for the spoon to stand alone in mine.

FB

  • ideal conditions when everything in the garden is ready. You can wing it with canned tomatoes and dried herbs, but it just lacks that PUNCH! Or that could be the wine.
14

My only contribution is to take whatever vegetarian base sauce - or gravy- as my bestest girlfriend’s New York city mama used to say - before you put anything in, put a few strips of anchovies in the hot olive oil. Now, I knew you’re probably saying “Eeeewwww” but they dissolve to nothing and add a certain je ne sais quoi to the red stuff.
And lots of crushed garlic. What time do we eat!?

15

My mom was just over and made her traditional sauce. Some items of interest that may not have already been mentioned are:

  • fry the tomato paste for a bit in a hot pan. That’s right, fry it.

  • Pork neck bones add a lot of flavor. If you can’t find them, use pork shoulder. It’s cheap and very meaty.

  • Cook it a loooong time, like 4 or 5 hours. I saw some pencil-necked idiot on a PBS cooking show going on about how you can make sauce in just a few minutes that’s just like Mama’s. Baloney - what he made is called “salsa cruda” - (nearly) raw sauce. It has its place, but it is not what most people think of when they think of spaghetti sauce.
    On the sauce vs. gravy thing, I always thought gravy implied the presence of meat. However, my Sicilian forebears never called it gravy, only sauce. They also never used the term “pasta” - it was always macaroni, and they ran an actual macaroni factory in a little building next door to their house. Pasta also means “pastry” in Italian, so macaroni is less ambiguous. For specific forms of macaroni, they used the specific words, like spaghetti or linguine.

16

Sure. I use the whole can of tomatoes, inclduing the liquid that is inside the tomatoes and the liquid they’re packed in. That’s the base of the sauciness – it’s a little thin so tomato paste helps flavor it and thicken it.

These are the “whole, peeled” tomatoes in the big can.

I’ve made versions with fresh tomatoes. You want to peel them, and maybe seed them. With these I improvise a lot. I’ll work on the sauce with stock, tomato paste, heavy cream, wine. You need a lot more added salt in the dish, too.

On sausage: I cut it up into bite-size pieces still in the casing. It makes it look funny because the casing will shrink up a bit but I don’t mind. It would be fine to remove the sausage from the casing. Hot or Sweet is fine. If I make a double batch, I’ll use a package of each. I’ll use sweet and NOT add red pepper flakes depending on the “company” too.

Good sausage is better – duh. We have a couple butchers in Baltimore that make really good sausage, but I like the stuff the supermarket puts together too. I don’t know if they make it there or use an outside vender. I’ve never used the Johnsonville. It always looked a little too perfect for me.

I forgot to add: for color, I’ll add chopped parsley with a couple minutes left in cooking. I forgot to say it because I left it out of the most recent incarnation.

17

My latest pasta invention, which my wife says she could eat every day. It’s got some heat, so careful with the chili paste:

1 pound of medium fresh shrimp, deveined and shelled
Fish sauce
olive oil
sembal olek (chili paste)
sea salt
zest of 1/2 lemon

olive oil (yes, again)

white wine
butter

Cooked thin spaghetti

Buy the best fish sauce you can find. Cheap is bad. Prepare a marinade with fish sauce and olive oil (about a 4:1 ratio), a tablespoon or so of chili paste, a teaspoon of sea salt and the lemon zest (or use minced lemon grass).

Marinate the shrimp for a couple of hours.

Drain the shrimp, retaining the marinade. Saute the shrimp in a little olive oil until done. Remove from the pan. Dump in the retained marinade and some white wine and bring to a boil. Allow to cook briskly until reduced by about half. Add a little butter to smooth it out. Remove from the heat until just before the pasta is done. Return the shrimp to the pan to heat through, then serve over the drained pasta.