Easy Weeknight Sausage Ragù | Kenji's Cooking Show

hey there this is Kenji and today we're making a sausage and tomato ragu so you can think of this as kind of like the beginner's Bolognese like it's a it's very very simple very few ingredients its it's better than your sort of typical you know like my mom when I was a kid made meat sauce by sauteing some ground beef and adding a can of you know prego bottled jarred pasta sauce to it and calling him the simmering and calling of the day and that's how I did it in college also this is more of a cross between a traditional ragu Bolognese which is made with generally with pancetta beef veal pork sometimes other meats that are all browned together and then simmered in milk with a little bit of wine and so and and and just a touch of tomatoes so a real ragout a real regular Bolognese is mostly a meat sauce with just a little bit of tomatoes this one's kind of a cross between a more traditional regular Bolognese and a simpler sort of Italian American style meat sauce and the trick here is that we're using bulk Italian sausage to give a lot of flavor to this dish without a ton of ingredients so to start off actually know what to start off I'm gonna I got right here half a pound of Italian sausage and here have a pound of ground beef all right the only reason I have a mix of two is because that's just what I happen to have in my fridge you can do all Italian sausage in fact you could do all ground beef if you want also just won't taste as as flavorful but you can go all ground sausage you could buy a pound of sausage and use that I'm just using a mix because that's what I have so olive oil in a skillet we're gonna get our meats in there hmm you start off by well we're gonna start off by cooking them first we're not necessarily gonna Brown them is there's a couple schools of thought of thought on whether to deeply brown your meat or not when you're starting a ragu like this I know you know chefs like Mario Batali whose work I won't link to anymore but chefs like Mario Batali he says deeply deeply brown your meats where is some more traditional bolognese recipes don't have you browned the meats as much and you know it really depends who you ask my old chef you know when I was a when I was a line cook in Boston I worked at a place called number nine Park my old chef Barbara Lynch she specialized in northern Italian cuisine which is where Bologna is and so I you know in the wintertime in the fall in the winter I was the one who made all the bolognese sauce for the restaurant so I would make it you know 20 pounds of ground meat at a time and when I was doing it we wouldn't deeply brown the meat we would just lightly brown it so the trade up is that by deeply browning you get more flavor you guys heard more than brown meillard reaction flavors but your meat also comes out a little kind of tougher and a little green e'er whereas if you don't brown it as deeply and you just simmer it in the sauce do you want to put the more sort of silky smooth texture all right so the other ingredients were going with a carrot I'm gonna do about half of a diced onion that's when you dice our onion split it in half first cut off the tip end like that take off the skin plus the layer immediately underneath the skin cuz usually that layer is pretty tough too okay clean that all off and then you start by making vertical cuts so I actually I have a mathematician friend who I enlisted the help of n we made a a model of an onion and calculated sort of what the most efficient way to get relatively almost perfectly even die sweets we set certain tolerances like perfectly even dice almost perfectly even dice with the minimal number of cuts so some people say to go gravely to the center that doesn't really work because then you end up with these tiny pieces in the center and bigger pieces on the outside some people say go straight up and down that doesn't really work either because you all then you end up with kind of long slivered pieces here what we found was the optimal was basically about the golden ratio so you imagine so imagine that the height the radius of your onion is one so the top of the onion to your cutting board that's one and if you go down from there point six so that's around here and that's kind of where you want to aim your cuts your first vertical cuts and that's going to give you the most even dice with the least amount of work at some point I will we had a whole mathematical model set up where you could put in different you know what we calculated it but it you you said and you could put different tolerances for for the size of the pieces that you want and the number of cuts that you wanted to do and then it would spit out the position that you want to aim your knife when you're cooking all right so our meat is going there browning a little bit that's all right so this is what I use to break up me the pastry cutter some people use a potato masher I find that a pastry cutter works much better if you're using a nonstick pan but you can for this if using a nonstick pan or something that you're worried about there's scratching up too much just be careful not to push all the way down to the bottom of the pan usually the meat kind of stops it from hitting the bottom of the pan anyway so you're okay and of course if you're very worried about it you can go in with a a wooden spoon or or one of these guys this is a early wood wooden spatula early what is the company that makes these okay so that's going on I'll leave that in the sink for a second so we're getting pretty close to where I want it so not really too much brownie and if you notice what I did was at the very beginning I kind of left the meet in place for a while without really touching it in that way you do get some sort of browning on the you know sort of a large block of meat at the outset and that's gonna help develop flavor but then you don't really have too much overcooked meat the rest of the meat kind of stays a little bit more tender and just gets simmered as opposed to really hard seared okay so once that meat starts to turn that color we're gonna go in and add our carrots and onions if you happen to have a stalk of celery handy you could also add that here but I find that for this kind of sauce the carrots and the onions are really the the vital part the celery is Laureys kind of optional okay [Music] now we want to cook this until those carrots and onions soften we don't want them to brown really because we know we don't want to add any extra sweetness to this we just want those just soften up so they're gonna sweat a little bit and meanwhile I'm going to grab my oh I have something throw my garlic there I grab my garlic let's go with like three cloves of garlic here come up the bottoms and do a smack smack smack let's just make a rule Wak Wak Wak okay now we'll come back and give it an even harder whack whack in a smear so on my channel I have a recipe for a ragu Bolognese that well that's some Italians take exception to because I had a lot of non-traditional ingredients in it although you do have to remember that regulable an essay is a even the you know there's there's a lot of debate about what goes into it even now depend on so it's really hard to be a purist about something like that you know the one thing I add in there that I think people really take exception to is fish sauce but I'm gonna stand by it it uh it's not a traditional ingredient even though the Romans did use fish sauce they did it out the Romans did not invent ragu Bolognese so it's not even a traditional ingredient by by those standards but it does bring out the meatiness of the dish and so I think it's totally fine if you want to do that I'm not gonna put it into this one but I would not fault anyone if they wanted to okay now our garlic's gonna go in here vegetables are softening up and Sousa just about another minute of cooking is good here once the garlic goes and you don't really want to cook it too much because that garlic will burn faster than well faster than anything else that's already in this pot and so you don't want that garlic to start burning so about that once you get the garlic in about a minute max grab fresh ground black pepper my cousin lives in Bologna and my wife and I took our daughter there couple years ago she was an infant and ate a lot of ragu Bolognese and a lot of tortellini and broth and we did find that you know there was pretty significant variation in the Bolognese depending on where you got it which restaurant you went to although they all sort of called the same basic blueprint Bologna is a very rich City well traditionally a very rich City which is why they you know the dishes there tend to be very meat and dairy heavy alright so next we're gonna add some wine you can do white wine red wine doesn't really matter as long as it's dry I just have this bottle open I'm going to do it and use this it's about a cup of wine in there give you a little more more smush okay and then I'm gonna open up this can of tomatoes these are salmon san marzano tomatoes and this one happens to be crushed tomatoes which I generally don't recommend vine because there's so much variation in their quality but if you have a brand that you like and you know well then of course it's totally fine to buy them this brand I know I like I've had it added many times it's excellent you know one of the one of the advantages of crushed Tomatoes is that when they are when it's a good brand they tend to be better than any other kind of tomato because they are picked the ripe as' because they don't have to worry you know some other types of tomatoes they have to pick them when they're a little bit under ripe so that they don't get mushy inside the can this one they're smashing them anyways so they tend to be picked the ripens that they are usually better quality or a better flavor that is alright so once that wine is reduced by about 1/2 that's just a couple minutes here I'm gonna go ahead and add some Tomatoes so this is a lot more Tomatoes and traditional ragu Bolognese would have and that's because this is not a traditional ragu Bolognese so this is gonna be about you know half meat half tomatoes or as a you know a real ragu Bolognese would be mmm maybe one part meat to a quarter of a part tomatoes just got one more ingredient and that is milk when I had about a cup of milk to this you could also use cream or half-and-half if you that's what you've got and that's what you want to use it doesn't matter too much you know what and while I'm at it because I've got them I've got a bunch of these got a bunch of parmesan rinds that I you all save your parmesan rinds right of course you do we're gonna drop in a couple of these parmesan rinds that's gonna give it some more richness and flavor now all it takes is a little bit of time see how easy that was so I'm gonna bring this up to a simmer bring it up to a boil reduce it to a bare simmer and then let it simmer on the stovetop for a couple hours stirring it every once in a while just to make sure that it doesn't burn but that's about it it's gonna come to a boil I'm gonna reduce it to a simmer I'm gonna let it go and then I will see you again in one hour and so this reduce it until you want to reduce it until you start seeing some of the fat so you can see if you look close here you can see some of that fat starting to separate out let's assign that a lot of the water content which is you know comes from both the meat and the vegetables as well as the wine in the milk that a lot of that is on the verge of evaporating away and so there's not enough of it left to form a stable emulsion of the fat you want to stop it right before it gets to the point where that emulsion breaks so when you start to see little bits of fat pooling out on the surface and it's really nice and rich and thick like this that's when you're done and now it's sauce like this you know it's great in lasagna I'm gonna put a recipe for lasagna up actually at some point either before maybe don't maybe it's already up I don't know where I'm putting these at them it's great for lasagna it's also great for sort of any kind of thick either thick or thick tubular pasta so something like tagliatelle or or pappardelle or penne penne Rigate and anything that's sort of thickened will sort of stop up take take up big chunks of meat with it you don't want to do this something like an angel hair noodle other than that you know put it on whatever you want it's also great like on top of mmm you can bake eggplants with this on top of it I think that's delicious you can bake all kinds of vegetables other you know zucchini eggplant squash you can eat it on its own with a spoon you can serve it on a baked potato you can serve it on pieces of toasted bread rubbed with garlic yeah it's just a good all right do I need to get like a beauty shop by the window of this really no it's funny the dogs did not smell this cooking today I don't know where they are oh man doesn't that look good and really really easy and honestly like I think it was like about ten minutes of actual well you'll know from the time of the video but there's about 10 to 15 minutes of actual work and the rest of just sitting there waiting for it to simmer down and you wind up with something that is well delicious delicious hmm great all right all right my friends see you next time [Music] you [Music]

Channel: J. Kenji López-Alt

Views: 513,107

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Id: LoDd6_u_970

Length: 16min 25sec (985 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 22 2020