Cookware link updated
Fuck roux.
It fucks with flavor way too much.
If you need to thicken something either reduce it or add a slurry to it.
I love this threadâŚ
Green, you said: âNo matter how little pasta you cook at a time, you should use no less than a gallon or about 4 liters of water.â
why is that? sometimes i cook mac and cheese, a gallon of water for that seems a bit excessive 
Well⌠mac and cheese is different. Unless itâs mac and cheese.
But seriously, the less water there is, the more the temperature will drop. This affects not only the total cooking time, but also the amount of released starch retained by the surface of the noodles. This means that the more water you have, the less likely the pasta will stick together and vice versa. Plus, with more volume, you usually have a higher water level, which means you can better submerge long noodles like spaghetti or angel hair.
ah ok. thats interesting, thanks.
Tomato sauce for pizza
As November says, you want a power of between 300-420W, so if you have a 1000-1400W microwave oven, use 30% power.
Those are all either too complicated or just have stuff you donât need.
You donât ever really want to use powdered anything when the fresh version is so much more accesible, and especially with these ingredients, cheap.
This is how most places Iâve worked at make their marinara sauces. This is pretty much interchangeable with pizza sauce and something for pastas, you just might wanna fuck with the seasonings a bit depending on what you are making. Usually I like my pizza sauce a little sweet to offset everything else.
Anywho.
You can go about this in two ways.
You can either:
(A)
- Canned WHOLE tomatoes (What happens here is that the tomatoes are picked RIPE, then canned. Therefore you donât get that nasty acidity you get with the tomatoes you get from your produce section.)
- Bay leaf
- S&P
- Garlic, minced
- Mirepoix
- Olive Oil
- Sugar (optional)
Cook off your mirepoix first. Make sure you put your carrots first, get em all nice and brown, then celery, and then onion last since it cooks the fastest. Make sure you get all three nice and caramelized as the fond from cooking all of this will give you a shitload of flavor. Add a little oil and toss in your garlic and let it cook for a bit. Next add your canned tomatoes and your bay leaves. Youâre gonna wanna cook this down for about an hour till everything gets super super soft. Like to the point if you press a piece of celery into the side of the pot with a spoon it just falls apart. At this point remove your bay leaves. Assuming you have une, use your beurre mixer/immersion blender/stick blender/boat motor to puree everything to whatever consistency you want your sauce. At this point you can add some red wine and cook off the alchohol for flavor. Now just season your shit and youâre good. If it tastes a little off add a touch of sugar and taste. A little touch of sugar usually puts all the flavors into balance for some reason.
(B)
- Canned tomato puree or sauce. (Heinz works pretty well seeing as it really jsut is pureed tomatoes, try to get whatever is the least processed, you donât wanna add some companyâs finished sauce to your sauce, you just want tomatoes that are already pureed)
-Onion
-Garlic - S&P
- Sugar
Pretty much the same thing as above, but just a little simpler.
I pretty much just use (A) when catering or actually cooking. (B), however is perfect for home, when you need a quick sauce with good flavor.
You might want to explain what mirepoix is.
Omitting stuff is always an option.
Spaghetti Sauce Thread
I couldnât find a thread specifically for spaghetti, and this is for this topic in particular, so I started one here. Really, I am trying to scout for the best recipe for spaghetti sauce, since the bottled variety from the stores is not quite cutting it. So, do you know of any good spaghetti sauce recipes?
What wrong wit da bottled?I use classicos spicy basil sauce and combine that wit vidalia onion & garlic but before that I fry da hamburger halfway and add diced onions, 1 small teaspoon of diced garlic with a splash of worcheshire sauce. BAM! dinner is served baby!
have you ever had spaghetti made with ketchup? it isnât bad.
just pasta, ground beef, and ketchup. i really like it.
That almost sounds like a weird meatloafâŚ
mad peeps make the mistake of only using one bottle of sauce per box of noodlesâŚyou need at least one and a half bottles per box.
as an italian iâm just going to let you know that a good sauce takes 3 hours or more to cook.
with that said you can cook it in massive quantities and freeze a bunch of it and eat it with pretty much anything. if you make a good meat sauce with some big chunks of beef and sausage then itâs not even weird to just heat up sauce and eat it with bread.
Iâm not going to tell you the exact recipe because i have no fucking idea what it is, but i do have a way of cooking sauce that has been passed down by my family. here it is.
start cans of tomato paste and chunk tomatos. one can of paste per can of chunk and equal can of water to every can of paste. mix it up a little bit and add a lot of salt to help it cook a little faster and bring out more tomato flavor. in a seperate pan fry up the sausage with some onion until itâs a little brown on the outside. then cook up your beef, but ONLY SEARING it. it will cook in the sauce so it can be raw in the middle. basically you just wanna brown up the sides for consistency and appearance.
ok so you dump that shit in the sauce pot and start adding your own flavors. oregano, basil, bay leaf, two whole garlic cloves and garlic powder. a little bit of paprika but only maybe a dash. a fucking handful of cheyenne pepper (if you have hot sausage). You can add potato and stuff if you want but i usually just stick with the onions as vegtables. the chunky tomato will make sure you have a nice consistency.
Itâs going to be very watery for a very long time. get a pack of cards and sit at your table and play solitaire for a couple hours. check on the sauce, stir the meat around so it doesnât stick to the bottom. if it does it will excrete oils that float on the top of your sauce and make it look unappetizing plus give you motherfucking heartburn. once your sauce has reached a thick consistency and all your meat is thorougly cooked (like the beef can be pulled apart) the sauce is finished.
after a couple hours of stirring it every 30 minutes and keeping it to a simmer/low boil you can start to pick out your pasta. KNOW what kind of pasta you want for your sauce. donât use fettucini because thatâs for white sauce. donât use ziti or angelhair because the pasta will not hold your red sauce well. I would use a thick pasta like spaghetti or mosticiolli (sp?). Mosticiolli is my favorite for a red meat sauce, itâs cylindrical like ziti but cut on an angle and rigded. great for keeping the flavor of a chunky sauce.
finally, drain your pasta and put it back into the pot you just boiled it in. Make sure you turn the heat off or put it on a different burner because itâs going to burn the pasta when you throw it back in. take a couple spoonfulls of sauce and mix it in with all your pasta to evenly coat it. you can also add a couple drops of olive oil to give it that slick shine. serve the pasta and sauce seperate because people vary widely on how much sauce they wanna take.
LAST BUT NOT LEAST.
make sure you get some good fucking italian cheese, none of the powdered shit. get a good piece of mozz, romano or parmesean and a cheese grater. i know the cheese is sort of expensive but for maybe 8 dollars you get a piece that is gonna last forever and will easily cover 40 sauce dinners. i like romano the best because it is the sharpest. make sure your cheese grater has very small gage holes. the thinner you slice the cheese on top of your sauce the more evenly it will melt.
enjoy.
ps - this is the longest post i ever made on srk.
nmmm
ummâŚprego
good shit