Hello again my food warriors and welcome back to the channel. Today we are making a classic Roman dish forno. This is this is my version of this dish. We first had this dish in a beautiful familyrun tratoria in Rome a number of years back and we we brought that that inspiration back home. Uh and this is kind of my variation of that. So to the family who ran that trateria, this is dedicated to you. Uh what I have here in my pot, this is a big Dutch oven. I’ve got one pound each of lean ground beef, lean ground pork, lean ground ve and this is how I start all of my meatbased sauces. Uh so we are going to first make a beautiful meat ragu similar to the the uh raguon that you can find uh again in full detail episode 54 on the channel. Um and so what we’re going to do here is we’ve got a little bit of a kind of an advanced version of this. So we’ve got our meat already browned off. All I have in this in this pot is about four or five tablespoons of a good extra-virgin olive oil. I have again a pound each of my ground ve and ground pork. And we’re just going to get this back on the heat. And right underway. There we are. Uh all I’ve added to this is just a little bit of salt and pepper. No other seasonings, nothing else. So we’re going to pick it up right from there. I’ve got my beautiful slab of pajetta always in the fridge and ready to go. And all I want to do here is I just want to cut off uh maybe two or three slices. And these are about/4 of an inch thick. And I always cut this off my big roll. And this way, there we are. It’s always ready to go back into the fridge and ready to go for the next recipe. So, all I’m going to do is just peel off the casing here. This is all a natural casing. And so, I’m going to pull this off. Definitely don’t want to eat this. That’s just for the seasoning of this beautiful classic cured meat product. This is the belly of the pig that has been salted and air dried. And all I’m going to do with this, these are three slices. They’re about a/4 of an inch thick. All I’m going to do with this is I’m going to cut this into a relatively fine dice. Now, in my version of my ragua bologn, and I get it, Bolognia is not in the same region as Latio or Rome is, but there’s a lot of similarities in terms of that rich, meaty ragu within the the region of Latio as well. In my version, there’s the three kinds of meat. Each one gives something different to the dish. And then we always have a a cured meat product here as well. So whether this is panchetta, whether this is guanchal, I always want to have something in there to give it a little bit of a salty savory note that I definitely miss when it’s not there. So I’m just going to cut this up into kind of quarter inch matchixs. And then from there, we’re just going to dice this up. So, I will take care of this and I will see you back in exactly 1 minute. All right, we are back. We’ve got our ponetta beautifully diced up. And what we’re going to do is throw this right into our Dutch oven here. We don’t really want to get a whole lot of color on this, but we do want the fat from that ponetta to render off into the dish. And there is as much goodness in the fat here as there is in the actual meat itself. And I always I always like to add at least one cured meat product into my into my rags. It gives it a beautiful savory note that you just can’t replicate by adding fresh meat. And so this is not meant to be added as a protein per se, but really more of a seasoning. So, while this is starting to heat up and cook off, we’ve got our vegetables. So, I have here the start of my soprito in my little handy chopper. Sometimes I use my food processor for this when I don’t want to use a box grater. We’re a little bit short on time today and so we wanted to speed things up a little bit. I’ve got two large carrots. I’ve got two baby zucchini. Uh I’ve got four or five cloves of garlic. And I’ve got about three or four ribs of celery in here as well. And all I’ve done is I’ve just I’ve cut this up into relatively, you know, uniform pieces. And this is really going to be kind of a paste that flavors the dish and lightens the dish by bringing sweetness and a good bit of fiber to the party as well. The only thing I haven’t put in here by way of my vegetables is my onion. This is a large white onion. All we’re going to do is we’re going to dice this up. The reason why I don’t put the onion in here, a lot of the juice tends to leech out of the onion and it tends to overpower the rest of the the vegetables in the soprito. And so we’re going to keep this separate as we cut this up. There we are. And we’re just going to cut this up into a kind of medium dice. Keep in mind this is going to be cooking away, simmering away in the oven for the next 2 hours. And so we don’t need to cut this all that fine. Anything left over here in terms of the end of the onion, we will just cut this up as well. There we are. As long as it’s relatively small, this will just melt away in that low oven over the next few hours. There we are. All right. And just a little end of the onion here. There we are. And a couple of these guys on the board. All right. Now, the other thing that we have here that we’re going to add to this is our everpresent chili pepper. We just want a gentle hum of heat. And so we’re only going to add one chili pepper here. This is a big pot. And so one chili pepper. Even if we add the seeds, which we do like regularly, we want the full impact of the pepper. It’s it’s not going to be all that hot. So what we’re going to do is just add all of this again into our pot. our onions, our chili pepper seeds and all. There we are. And to this we’re going to add the rest of our vegetable srito here. There we are. Now, this is really going to lighten up our ragu. It’s not It’s still going to be quite rich and meaty, but this brings a good bit of nutrition, a good bit of fiber, and it actually helps to lighten up the sauce. We’re going to be cooking this with obviously are made with potatoes, so they can be quite starchy as well. The vegetables really help lighten up the dish in addition to bringing a good bit of nutrition to the party. So, all I’m going to do here now is add a little bit of salt and pepper. There we are. And we’re going to let those vegetables sweat down. And as they do, they will delaze all of those beautiful meat juices that have caramelized and have crystallized to the bottom of the on the bottom of the pot here. So, I’m going to let this go for about five or 6 minutes. I will see you in that time. It’s been about 5 or 6 minutes. Our vegetables are starting to sweat down beautifully. They haven’t taken on any color, but they’ve started to release a lot of their liquid into the bottom of the pot. And what we’ve done here is we’ve been able to delaze all of those beautiful meat juices that have been stuck to the bottom of the pot. We have now about 6 ounces of a dry white wine. And all I’m going to do here is I’m just going to pour this into our handy chopper bowl. We’re going to give this just a little bit of a swing around. There’s absolutely no reason why any of those vegetables should go to waste. And there we are. We’re just going to throw this in. And what this is going to bring to the party is a little bit of acidity, a little bit of fruiness in addition to that which we’re going to get from our jarred tomatoes. So, we’re just going to give this a quick stir. And then we are going to add our tomatoes in there as well. We are Oh, the smell of this is absolutely fantastic. This is an avieto that I’m using today as a white wine. Oh, just the smell coming off that pot is absolutely fantastic. So, what we’re going to do now is we’re going to get our homemade jarred tomatoes. If you don’t have these kicking around the house, by all means, you could use a good quality pata or even a plum tomato that’s that’s canned. A good quality canned plum tomato or crushed tomato. I’m going to add a few of these jars in here. There we are. I’m telling you, when tomatoes are in season, it’s one of those things that we do every every year or two, and then we have them ready to go all year round. These are crushed samarano tomatoes. And in here to flavor our crushed tomatoes. I have some parsley, some basil, and some celery. Now, we’re going to yard all of those vegetables out. We’re not going to eat those. Those have already given all of their flavor to our tomatoes while they’ve been aging in the cellar. There we are. And now what I’m going to do is give this about a good half a jar’s worth of water as well. We want to make sure that all of this makes its way into the pot, that none of this is wasted. There we are. And then this is going to go into a 350°ree oven for about 2 hours uncovered. This will continue to reduce down. The reason why I like doing this in an oven as opposed to doing this on the stove top, stove tops tend to have hot spots. And as good as these pots are at dissipating the heat, there always tends to be a little hot spot right under where the flame is. And so in an oven, the heat attacks the food from all sides. And with that, you don’t get the hot spots. And so you can just throw it in an oven and go do something else. Get on with the rest of your day. There we are. So we’re just going to give this a quick stir. We’re going to bring this back up to the boil. There we are. And once this is back up to the boil, we’re going to add a couple of last minute flavorings and then we are going to get this guy right into the oven. So, I will see you in about 5 or 6 minutes time. Right, we are back. As you can see, our sauce is just coming up to the boil. This is exactly what we want. So full transparency, I did add one more one liter mason jar of my homemade tomatoes to this pot. Uh reason being it was a little bit thick and that that’s just one of those things that you you just develop that sense as you uh you start cooking a little bit more and more. It was it was a little thick for my liking and knowing that this would be going in the oven uh for a good 2 hours, it would continue to reduce and continue to thicken. And so there was still some additional space in our Dutch oven here. added another another one liter mason jar of our homemade tomatoes. Um recognizing full well that we’re making a double batch here. This is not all for for one dish. Uh this freezes very very well. And for you parents out there, this is a great way to hide vegetables, get them into your kids. Don’t like this? Don’t like don’t like zucchini? Don’t like carrots? Yeah. Yeah. Put them in a sauce. Trust me, they’ll eat them. So, what we’re going to do now, just before this gets into the oven, we’re going to season this with a little pinch of salt. We don’t want to overs salt, but we do recognize that none of the tomatoes had any salt in them. And so, we just want to give this a little bit of a head start. Little pinch of cracked black pepper as well, freshly cracked black pepper. And then I’ve got about four or five bay leaves that I’m just going to throw in. And I’ve got 3 tablebspoon of dry oregano. So, the reason why we’re putting this in now is we want this to bloom as it’s cooking. So, as this spends all of that time in the oven, we’re going to give this a quick mix. That oregano will bloom and it will continue to flavor our ragu here. And then, right as this comes out of the oven, we’re going to finish this with a little bit of fresh basil as we always do to bring that flavor of the garden into our dish. So, there we are. This is now bubbling away. We’re going to turn the heat off this burner. Like I said, I’m going to throw this guy into a 350°ree oven, completely uncovered, and I will see you in 2 hours. All right, we are back. It’s been a couple hours. Our sauce, our ragu just out of the oven. So now what we’re going to do here is we’re just going to give this a quick once over. And look how beautifully thick this has gotten. This is absolutely perfect. It’s not as loose as where we started, but it’s not thick and stodgy. This will be absolutely fantastic to have with our so all we’re going to do now is we are just going to finish this up with some last minute some last minute seasonings. Give it a quick taste to see where we’ve gotten. We’ve got a pot here. Boiling salted water. What we’re going to do is we’re going to get our started. So, this is 1 and a2 kilos of a good quality. This is a commercially made. Yes, we’ve made at home several times, but it’s been a busy day and we didn’t have time to make no today. And so, we’re going to use this brand, which is a brand that’s made in Italy. Really, really good quality stuff. So, we are just going to drop this into our boiling water here. And the thing to remember with is they do not take a long time at all to cook. Literally 3 or 4 minutes, these will float to the top when they’re ready to go. And that’s how we know they’re done. As soon as these float to the top, we want to pull these out of the water. We don’t want these to sit in our salted water any longer than necessary. And the reason being is they will soak that water up and obviously not something that we want to have. We don’t want water logged. We want that are beautifully light, beautifully pillowy, and that still have the ability to both thicken and absorb some of the sauce that they’re cooked in. And so what we’re going to do here is we’re just going to give this a quick taste. That is so good. It literally needs just a hint of salt and pepper from the point of view of seasoning. And so we’re going to give this with just a very light pinch of salt. Little pinch of black pepper. There we are. And now what we’re going to do is we are going to give this a stir. We are then going to fish out those bay leaves because they’re they’ve done their job. But certainly you don’t want to be eating those. And so we will pull these guys out. They have done what they were sent in there to do. And the last thing we’re going to add here is just a little bit of basil from the garden. Come on. Where are the other guys? I know they’re in here. So, if we can’t find them now, there they are. We will find them a little bit later as we spread our ragu over our casserole. So, we’ve got three here. We put five in. We know that we still have two to remove. Not a problem. We’ll be on the look for those just a little bit later. What we’re going to do now with our basil, this is basil, beautifully fresh, just picked from the garden. There we are. And all we want here are just these beautifully tender leaves. So, we will pull all of this off. And we want to maintain as much freshness as possible. This is why we’re adding this at the end. You want to maintain that fragrance, that freshness, and basil is one of those things that every self-respecting Italian absolutely just h loves the smell of fresh basil right out of the garden. There’s nothing like it. You can’t fake it. And so, we’re just going to give this just a rough chop. Nothing fancy. This is very rustic home cooking. We don’t need to shifad this. This is not restaurant cooking. This is food that is made in the home. And more specifically, this is laguchi napa. This is food that’s made essentially by the by the peasants historically using whatever was readily available and on hand. Basil from the garden, a little bit of meat, whatever was kicking around. There we are. There we are. So we are just going to throw this right into our reggu as the final touch. This needs nothing further. We are absolutely ready to go and start assembling our dish. There we are. So now what we’ll do is we’ll give our a little stir. We want to make sure that no one, not one of these guys is getting stuck to the bottom of our pot. We just want to make sure that There we are. They are all free to float to the surface when they are done. So, we’re going to give this one final stir and then we are going to start assembling our casserole dish. What I have here beside me is an Earththenware oven ready casserole dish. This is how I like to cook these types of of home-cooked Italian dishes. It’s rustic. Again, these are these are dishes that are traditionally made in the home. Aha, bay leaf. And clearly, we want to keep that theme and keep that presentation as we take this to the table. So, we have one final step here in our preparation. We’re just going to put There we are. Some of our ragu right at the base of our casserole dish. There we are. And as the float to the surface, we will add the beautiful rich ragu as well. There we are. So we’ll start with just a little bit of our ragu here. There we are. And then we can always add a little more if necessary. So I believe we have found our final bay leaf. Here he is. Good. All present and accounted for. And as these meow float to the surface, we want to make sure they’re ready to go. We simply skim these off the surface. We drain them well and we add them to our casserole dish. So, we’re going to give our another couple of minutes here while they finish cooking. But I will deposit these into our dish as we go. I will see you in about 2 minutes. We are back. All I’m doing now is I’m putting a little boonchini right on top here. So, bokchini is basically fresh mozzarella, little bite-size fresh mozzarella. We’re putting those right on top and those will melt in. Again, those will add a little bit of liquid to this as well. Very, very fresh, very, very milky. And then what I have here as well is some freshly grated mozzarella cheese. This is a dry curd mozzarella cheese that I grated just while I was waiting for my ragu to finish up in the oven. What I have here is about 300 g again of a dry curd mozzarella cheese. This is typically what you would find on a pizza or a lasagna. And so what we’re going to do is we’re just going to put some of that in here as well. So, as this goes into a hot oven to finish up, our cheese will melt and it will it will be beautifully creamy, beautifully gooey. And this this is again country cooking, farmhouse cooking at its best. Few simple ingredients, but each one as good as it can be. There we are. And so we will just spread this around to make sure that our cheese goes absolutely everywhere. What we’re going to do is we’re going to finish this up in a 450°ree oven for between 15 and 20 minutes. All we want to do is melt this cheese on top. We want to get our ragu bubbling bubbling up. Once again, that ragu will soak and absorb into our we will have a beautifully gooey, beautifully cheesy top layer. So, I will see you in about 20 minutes time. All right, we are back fresh out of the oven. Look at this beauty. Now, we are just going to let this sit for about 2 or 3 minutes. This is absolutely napalom hot right on top. So this cheese needs to set for a couple of minutes. Literally right out of the oven. This was about 15 minutes in the oven and about 3 minutes under the broiler just to make sure that we had a little bit of a unified color here. But we’re going to give this about 3 minutes. I will see you in 3 minutes when we are ready to serve. All right, we are just about ready to serve. But before we do, couple of serving suggestions for this dish. Now this this quantity here is enough easily for I’d say 8 to 10 people. Easily 8 to 10 hungry adults. Um this will easily feed. Now we’ve also made this before where we’ve served this in individual portions where we’ve made individual ramicans of this exact dish. And that way they come out of the oven boom right onto the table. Everyone’s got their individual serving dish. Uh could you very nice preparation there as well. So my mouth is watering. Ah we are going to get right in there. So, there we are. This cheese is still molten hot, but look at that. Look at that. The beauty with this preparation is the cheese literally kisses all of the. You don’t just get a layer of cheese on top. The cheese has melted down into the ragu. It is coating all of the. It has incorporated with the ragu. This is exactly what you’re looking for on a cold winter’s day, cold fall day when you’ve been working outside or shoveling snow. I’m telling you, coming into this, there are a few things there are a few things better. There we are. Oh, look at that. It’s a little messy to serve. I’ll give you that. But you know what? This is, as I say, home cooking at its best. And what we’re going to do here is we’re going to we have a second spoon so that we make sure we scrape all of that cheese off. There we are. And it is right in there. This is This is comfort food like few other dishes I know. Now I’m not going to touch this cuz this is again still rocket hot. Just going to move this off to the side for a sec. There are only two things that this needs. Only two things. The first one is a little spoon of Coach Joe’s chili oil. This stuff is absolutely nuclear. But you know what? When you’re talking about a dish that’s going to warm you from the inside out and food that’s really here to feed the soul, this this changes everything. That little spoon just gives it that little bit extra. And as always, we’re going to let it snow as if we don’t have enough cheese already. with a little bit of freshly grated pecorino romano as is traditional in Rome and certainly the surrounding region of Latio. There we are. Let it snow. Let it snow. Ah, there we are. I know we’re we’re in the middle of summer here, but every once in a while, I crave these these comfort food dishes, and this is just one of those that absolutely hits the mark every single time. Oh, there we are. All right, we’re going in. We are going in. Beautiful pillowing. They melt on the tongue. Beautifully light. Uh that beautiful rich meaty sauce. The cheese just cuts right through that. Those boonchini just give a beautiful, you know, beautiful creamy almost milky element to this dish. They really lighten up the ragu. That basil beautifully fragrant. Look at that. Look at that. And that little hint. That little hint of chili pepper. [Music] I love it. Absolutely fantastic. I do hope you try this. This will absolutely become one of your favorites. Absolutely become one of your family’s favorites. As always, do like and subscribe if you find the content useful. Do share the content as that is what we’re all about.
1 Comment
Gnocchi is the best