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Recipe

A Vat of Meat Sauce

LFGGGGGGGGGG

The biggest pan in the house, filled to an inch below the rim. This is not dinner, it is six dinners, and the work is identical whether you make two quarts or eight.

Whole tinned tomatoes, crushed by hand, and some of them left in large pieces on purpose. You can see them in the picture sitting on the surface. Passata gives you a smooth uniform sauce; hand-crushed whole tomatoes give you a sauce with things in it.

Three hours at the lowest heat the stove will hold. The colour goes from bright red to the deep brick in the photograph, and that colour change is the whole thing — it is the sugar in the tomato caramelising, and it cannot be hurried.

Makes
About 8 quarts
Hands-on
45 minutes
On the stove
3 hours
Freezes
3 months

Four hours, of which three are the pot muttering to itself and you doing something else.

A vat of finished meat sauce on the stovePasta and sauce served from the big pan againFinely diced peppers and onion for a batch of sauce
Shot the night it was made. Open any picture for the full photograph.

What you need

The meat

  • 4 lb ground beef, 80/20
  • 1 lb hot Italian sausage, out of its casings
  • 3 tbsp olive oil

The base

  • 4 onions, diced fine
  • 6 carrots, diced fine
  • 1 head celery, diced fine
  • 2 heads garlic, sliced
  • 2 red bell peppers, diced fine
  • 1/3 cup tomato paste
  • 2 cups red wine

The tomatoes and the long end

  • 4 x 28 oz tins whole peeled tomatoes, crushed by hand
  • 2 cups beef stock
  • 3 bay leaves
  • 2 tbsp dried oregano
  • 1 tbsp chilli flakes
  • A parmesan rind, if you have one
  • Salt and a lot of black pepper
  • A big handful of basil, at the end (from my garden)

How it goes

  1. 1 — Brown the meat in batches, properly

    A pound at a time in a hot dry pot, spread out and left alone until a crust forms before it is broken up. Four pounds dumped in at once boils in its own water and goes grey, and grey meat never recovers.

  2. 2 — Dice the vegetables small and cook them long

    Onion, carrot, celery and pepper cut small, into the fat left behind, twenty minutes over medium until everything has collapsed and gone sweet. This is the base and it is where most people cut the time in half.

  3. 3 — Tomato paste cooked out for three minutes

    Stirred in and fried until it darkens from red to brick and sticks to the bottom. Raw tomato paste tastes tinny and that flavour survives three hours of simmering.

  4. 4 — Wine in, scraped, reduced by half

    Everything stuck to the bottom of the pot lifts off into the wine. Let it cook down until the sharpness is gone — about eight minutes.

  5. 5 — Crush the tomatoes by hand, leave some whole

    Into a bowl and squeezed through your fingers, stopping before it is uniform. A few left nearly intact is what gives the finished vat its texture.

    pro tip — Do it in a deep bowl and wear something you do not care about. Tinned tomatoes travel further than you expect.

  6. 6 — Three hours at a bare mutter, lid off

    Meat back in, tomatoes, stock, bay, oregano, chilli and the parmesan rind. The lowest heat that still moves the surface. Stirred every half hour, scraping the bottom.

  7. 7 — Season at the END, not the beginning

    Eight quarts reduces by a fifth over three hours and anything you salted at the start will be concentrated. Taste and salt in the last twenty minutes.

  8. 8 — Basil off the heat, then portion it out

    Torn basil stirred in with the pot off the flame. Cooled, then into quart containers — flat, with a label and a date, because in two months you will not remember.

Six dinners from one afternoon. LFGGGGGGGGGG. LFG.

More of what comes out of this kitchen on the food wall.

Every picture on this page is one of mine. I paint for a living the rest of the time — that is the gallery, and the originals are for sale.