Ragu Can Save You
I got a wonderful introduction (and, as time went on, an in-depth education). As the latest scientific research has now confirmed, my instructor got it exactly right. You have to take it slow. The basic method is simple, although there’s a little trick to it. You brown a smallish piece of meat, along with a bit of onion, in the pot, using the best extravirgin olive oil you can find. Then you add a tablespoonful of chopped or crushed tomatoes, and simmer it slowly until it turns dark brown. Then another spoonful. Wait til the color is right, then another spoonful. When you’ve got the right quantity, remove the meat and keep simmering. Eight hours later, you’ve got it. Cook the pasta, pour the ragu on it, and your health and happiness are significantly advanced.
Yes, a bit of parmigiano or pecorino is welcome.
For those of you who read Italian, there’s a fine Marxist history of Neapolitan cuisine with the intriguing title “From leaf eaters to maccheroni eaters,” which is a fascinating social history of early modern and modern food in this fascinating city.
When you’re done eating your ragu, have a nice espresso and laugh. You’ve delivered a blow to the belly of the beast.
Ah, the slowness! This kitchen admonishment reminds me of a simple experiment you can make for yourself if you have a metronome in your home: On the sliding scale where you regulate the tempo, there are usually two graduations, one in beats per minute, the other one shows the standard name of the tempi, in Italian of course, Largo, Adagio, Moderato, etc…
One of these tempi is “Andante”, which means “as in walking”. Adjust the metronome to this tempo, get it going, listen to the clicks, and try to walk to them. You may come to wonder how it is possible that walking can possibly be such a slow rhythm, but evidently there was a time when it was, when the metronomic tempi were formalized by the Italians in the late 18th century. Today we do everything so quickly, we don’t even notice how the contour of the clouds is changing, something which may come to you quite naturally while properly preparing the Ragu, so it might be as nourishing to the soul as it is to the body?
You may be surprised to know (or not if you know Iranians as well as you seem to do) that Ragu is a popular dish among Iranians. Mia moglie has been preparing it for years, especially when the in-laws come visiting. However she uses a slow crock pot to prepare it. I have had Ragu everywhere, even in Italy, but I still think cara mia’s recipe is the best. Unconditional love, I suppose. Thank you for your note on coffee. I shall promptly show it to her so she quits nagging me on my 8 cup a day habit. Now if you would be kind enough to dig up some old Neopolitan document (Marxist or otherwise) on the benefits of a stogie whilst sipping coffee my already strong admiration for you will increase exponentially. Grazie mille, dottore.
two important ingredients seems to be missing, celery and carrots, but then, I use to make the Bolognese ragú: add only one or two celery leaves finely chopped and a carrot (I pass the carrot through a grater to get it finely chopped), you fry them with the onions at the begining, the rest is the same.
For all the meats that need cooking time more than 8 hours, like gulash, ragu or spezzatino, I use a pressure cooker and only 1 hour. This is a major break of the slow cooking philosophy, but… you know, that’s modern life: not everybody can spend 8 hours in a kitchen
for just 1 dinner
Yikes! Stand down the onions!
I asked someone of Italian descent how to make a good ragu and after she listed the ingredients–a bone with meat on it, garlic, mushrooms if desired, tomatoes from Italy–I asked about the onion. She said “Onions are very controversial.” It wasn’t until I omitted the onions that my sauce became truly delicious.
Cook slowly until the tomatoes turn burgundy in color.
YMMV.
Indeed, overcooking onions caramelizes them into sugar and render the food overly sweet. The savory flavor component of onions doesn’t survive in the heat for very long. Using more garlic instead and adding a teaspoon of sugar (to improve the tomato flavor) works better I think.
The ‘extra virgin olive oil’ is not a good oil to heat because it has too many compounds in it that burn easily and add a nasty taste at frying temps, use light olive oil instead, or even better, canola/lard/ghee/dripping to fry at high temps, then add the virgin olive oil for the taste just before serving.
And instead of standing there for hours whilst cooking your food to death, stick the entire lot in a pressure cooker, it has the same effect on tenderizing the meat, 15 min on high should be sufficient.
Long cooking times don’t really do much other than break the meat tissues down, but sadly so, at the price of degrading nutrients and flavors of the other ingredients.
And at what point in the cooking does one open the first bottle of that other wonderful antioxidant, Chianti?
Thank you for sharing this wonderful story! It brings back fond memories of my grandmother, who was born just outside Naples and made the best ragu on the planet. Although she never wrote down her secrets, fortunately as a kid I often got to watch her in the kitchen, and more recently I’ve managed (after years of experimentation) to perfectly “reverse engineer” her sauce in my own home. Now I make authentic Neopolitan ragu for my own family and friends. Even better, I’ve written down the process so I can pass my grandmother’s secrets on to future generations of pasta-loving, antioxidant-craving diners.
Oh, and my advice to Ytzik and anyone else who can’t spend 8 hours in the kitchen: Start the night before. Then just before going to bed, put a lid on the pot, turn the heat down as low as possible, and let it simmer very slowly overnight. Next morning, put the pot in the frig till you’re ready to make dinner. (This last step also gives you the chance to skim off all the congealed fat before you reheat your sauce. I’ve found that the meats my grandmother used in her ragu — beef ribs, Italian sweet sausage, and fresh pigs feet — put off lots of fat that you’re better off removing before serving.)
As they say, mangia, mangia.
You shouldn’t skim off the fat because that’s where all of the fat soluble components such as the lycopene and vitamin are concentrated. Furthermore, with little fat your body wouldn’t be able to absorb these arguably extremely healthy nutrients.
I’m firmly convinced that most Americans eat junk food because they just don’t have the time to prepare a proper meal. My mom and dad were both born and raised in Italy and both of them taught me the value of good Italian food. Also, we would always make a lot more food than we needed so that we could eat leftovers for a few days. This would allow you to have some good food and not force you to make more sauce. Try using some spaghetti and a little tomato sauce leftovers and combining it with an omlette, or a “frittata” as the Italians call it. Makes for a good meal, especially with Italian bread.
The Italians know how to do two things well: Eat and make little Italians. Pity the rest of the busy world doesn’t learn from that.
sadly, the Italians don’t make little Italians anymore.
true. but neapolitans do.
What? No colatura?
Coffee, meat, tomatoes, olive oil & pasta. How could that combination NOT contribute to a longer life?
jpl17: fresh pigs feet sound tantalizing.
Other details aside, the slow cooker/crock pot is definitely the way to go. I always hated preparing our own family recipe (heavy on the pureed canned tomato and hamburger) and then having the damn thing on the stovetop splattering me and the entire kitchen for the next four hours and leaving an indestructible burned crust on the bottom of the pot. I recently tried a more Bolognese recipe designed for the slow cooker from one of those crockpot cookbooks and it worked beautifully with so much less toil and trouble.
Hopefully, I can adapt the family recipe to the slow cooker.
I’m 1/32 Neapolitan.
Your great-great grandaddy was ICE CREAM????
Yes: chocolate, vanilla and strawberry.
You’re officially more Italian than me.
To eat a ragu alla bolognese cooked in Napoli, that’s plain heresy.I am now 11 years in Bologna, and pasta con ragu is a very popular staple: BUT I must stand out for Bologna supremacy in every corner of the pasta culture.Try ( in Bologna or around in the Emilia-Romagna province ) Tortelloni – tortellini- tortellacci _ three kinds of stuffed pasta looking like a folded ear and filled with ricotta-spinach-salvia-minced meat-etcc… and add beside the king contorno : Porcini mushrooms.If you want to bring home the very best ready to cook tortellini , buy in Bologna centro storico food shops the take-away tortelloni by SOVERINI.And drink the best Lambrusco sparkling red ” Ottello nero ” ( by Cantina Ceci harvested in Torrile near Parma ) or ” Ca de Medici ” ( hard to find but a dream ) harvested in Gaida di Reggio Emila.Lambrusco are cheap wines ( 6 €/bottle)n but they sing in the mouth like a Giuseppe Verdi opera.
I won’t discuss that
Three things I’ve loved from Emilia-Romagna:
1.- Ragù bolognese
2.- steak of “mora” romagnola
3.- Albano wine
Michael:
The Slick one and I send our warmest Aloha to you and Barbara! The ragu at the Camp qualifies as a certified Ledeen recipe
One of these days we will actually join you!!
Plus you have to move to Italy or Spain or Greece or France or another normal country with normal people, without the crim nig-nogs and abortion qunt culture.
I find Ketchup is the best sauce for pasta or cottage cheese
Wikipedia defines Ragu as “meat sauce” from pretty much any meat, cooked slowly with a lesser amount of tomatoes.
How is the Italian PR sensationalism around Ragu reconciled with the fact that diets with a large percentage of meat are correlated with increased cancer rates, while diets with a large percentage of tomatoes, other vegetables, and virgin olive oil are correlated with decreased cancer rates of certain types?
Do the anti-cancer properties of the minority of tomatoes and virgin olive oil in Ragu cancel out the majority of the pro-cancer offal?
Or are the supposed anti-cancer benefits of Ragu pure old fashioned Neapolitan propaganda?
Caveat Emptor, Baby…
Listen carefully (well, read) :
1.- Correlations are NOT Causations
2.- Of course pretty much anything that will make you live longer, will be correlated with cancer, because cancer is for the most part a disease of the old age. Are you saying that to avoid cancer we should live less?
“1.- Correlations are NOT Causations
2.- Of course pretty much anything that will make you live longer, will be correlated with cancer, because cancer is for the most part a disease of the old age. Are you saying that to avoid cancer we should live less?”
That was actually the legal defense used by tobacco companies, which denied that smoking cigarettes causes cancer.
If you believe that argument, carry on eating a diet heavy in meats and doing other activities strongly correlated with cancer, maybe your superior logic will result in your living longer… seems to me like begging for a Darwin Award, but good luck.
So according to your “logic”:
If a tobacco company said “correlations are not causations” then it should be the contrary ? Correlations ARE causations because evil companies said the opposite? It’s you who are begging for a D.A.
Superior logic is what’s required to obtain results in scientific studies. If you don’t like them, you are just contradicting yourself.
Example:
Being BORN is 100% correlated with dying: Everybody reaching the point of death was actually born sometime. But being born is not the Causation of dying. Maybe you should apply your anti-logic and abort yourself (late late late term abortion) to put an end to your problems.
The longer we live, the more the risks.
“The longer we live, the more the risks.”
That’s a tautology (meaningless rhetoric, not a logical argument).
At the end of the day, the only conclusion is for you go your way and take your risks, and I’ll go my way and take my risks.
Good luck, polite friend.
A tautology is also logical identity that can’t be defeated/refuted/neglected.
And that’s exactly what you show here. Meaningless for you and for people like you, who would say that the expression “A = A” is meaningless, yet there is a reason why Parmenides, Aristotle, Aquinas and many more, put emphasis on that tautology.
Tautology is such that any attempt to refute it or neglect it is futile, it keeps being true forever and ever.
They did a study of 100 cigarette smokers.
100 people smoking 2 packs a day for 28 years.
How many got cancer?
16.
Smoking is a secondary cause of cancer not primary.
Dec 15, 2009 In many ways living green simply means revisiting simpler times and smoke-cured country hams have been a tasty tradition in Tennessee since pioneer days.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdRhpxv82cQ&list=FLJT4f0vR0X4yjpiKwN_HIgg&index=2&feature=plpp_video
The prime cause of cancer was discovered back in 1930 by Otto Warburg, a nobel prize winner. He was a Jew living in Germany under the protection of Hitler during the NAZI years. Warburg discovered that the lack of oxygen within a cell can turn a cell cancerous. A cell that has lost as little as 35% of its oxygen can turn cancerous and once cancerous cannot revert. Warburg was right almost 100% of the time. He was a hardcore scientist who often did experiments 10 times until he reached a conclusion. More than 60 years later Brian Peskin, MIT grad, connected the dots. He explains why cells lose their oxygen. It’s due to the processing of oils that have stripped its omega 6 health value. For a lot more info go to brianpeskin.com.
Peskin will actually be in Germany on June 16 doing a tour, too bad he won’t be in Italy.
EXACTLY It’s a feeling of the present expressed at that moment!! Let there be songs to fill the air!!