Meat Sauce

Some forewarning - this is going to take most of a day. The great news is, you can get a good 5 meals out of it, and its pretty hard to actually mess it up. To start, this is all based off of a Good Eats recipe (found here). The only major change is that broth was used instead of wine.

The net result is a very rich, hearty sauce - good enough to eat by itself (when you run out of pasta on your plate), which is unusual (for me, at least). The only drawbacks are the whole 'takes a day' deal (oh, and the giant mess).

Start by cooking the bacon inside the dutch oven long enough to render out the fat (the bacon is leftover as a good snack). To the leftover fat, add 2 large onions (chopped), some salt & pepper, and a spice bag containing a star anise pod and some cloves (crushed). Spice bags can be found online, or at Bed, Bath, & Beyond (where I found mine). The idea there is to extract the fat-soluble flavors from those spices, without having bits of star anise and clove in your sauce (they are quite bark like).

You're going to now need to cook the onions on medium-low heat for close to an hour until they carmelize (that is, turn brown). Do be sure to stir them fairly often. While you're doing this, you can start cooking the meat. The recipe calls for a pound of course ground beef and pork - I just get the beef/pork/veal mix available for meatloaf (and that comes as 1.4 pounds - the more the merrier).

Get your saute pan heated up with some olive oil, then brown your meat until it reduces pretty well (ideally you're producing stuck-on bits in the pan for de-glazing later).

Remove and drain the meat and add a half-cup of broth (or wine) in the pan to scrape off the burnt-on bits of meat -- let this reduce and then set it aside for later.

By now you'll discover the onions are well reduced and ready. To this, add 3 stalks worth of celery (or 9 of those four-inch pieces they make for serving with wings) and 3 cloves of garlic, all chopped/minced. Let this reduce with the onions for another half hour.

These will, eventually, reduce just like the onions did, meaning it is time to really start building the sauce.

Remove your spice bag (don't want to eat that, remember, being cotton and all) and add your meat, the de-glazed pan contents, 3 cups of broth, 3/4 of a cup of evaporated milk (NOT sweetened condensed milk), and a secret ingredient, some porcini mushrooms (which you won't even notice by the end). This is going to simmer on low heat for at least 3 hours, giving the meat time to break down (think of it as a stew). Stir every half hour or so.

When you have a little over an hour to go on the meat portion, we can start on the tomato portion. In the saute pan from earlier, start on medium-high heat with some olive oil and 3 cloves of garlic (sliced). After heating those for a few seconds, add 2 cans of diced tomatoes, and a mess of herbs (1 tbs oregano, 2 tsp basil, 2 tsp marjoram - if you don't have marjoram, and you probably don't, just use some more oregano or a little thyme). Have these tomatoes reduce for a good half-hour.

After the half-hour, we're gonna add some more fun. 2 tbs of tomato paste (I added a little more), 1 tbs red wine vinegar (or sherry vinegar - again I added a little more), 1 tbs of ketchup (!), and 1 tsp of Worcestershire sauce. Reduce this for ANOTHER half-hour, until you can do something like the following.

You can extract some more flavor by, at this point, 'frying' it a bit (pushing the heat up to high and adding a little more olive oil - stir constantly here or it will burn). When done, add to your now-finished meat portion of the sauce.

Serve over spaghetti or fettuccine or something - I like to have as much sauce as noodle myself (it's good enough to eat straight).

Now for a fun storage tip - don't just toss all your leftover in a container and freeze it - you'll be stuck with this giant chunk of food you have to thaw to portion out and then refreeze. Instead, freeze individual portions like above.

Time: 5 Hours
Difficulty: 4/5
Cleanup: 5/5
Taste: 5/5