Italian Sausage Ragu to Rival Marcella’s Bolognese

[JCBBQ]

I came across Stefano Secchi’s video about his Italian sausage ragu and thought I’d give it a try. He’s a Michelin Star chef in NYC who studied for years with Massimo Bottura - an incredible chef in Italy.

I thought the technique was interesting. Very EZ but requires a lot of time to reduce, but virtually hands free.

Here’s some pics of what I did.

Starting with the sausage. I used about 50/50 spicy and fennel. I mixed it. Then flattened it. Seared it to get some Maillard but only cooking it 50%. I then chopped up some prosciutto and added it with the sausage in a mixer and spun it for 10 mins. The idea is to Not have any big chunks in the final pasta dish.




The next step is to make the sofrito. This is a Softito Bianco so no carrots. Equal parts onion, shallots, green onion, and celery. Here’s the interesting part - you first blend it w EVOO to create an emulsion. THEN you cook it in the same pot you did the sausage. After it cooked down I added about a bottle and a 1/3 of cheap Pinot Grigio. I cooked that down until there was almost no more wine. This is to provide acidity. I then added the pork and a ton of chicken stock. Oh, and I added Parmesan rinds. I’ve always heard you should save the rinds but never knew what to do with them. Ha! I’ve got one idea now.




The video says to simmer for 8-10 hours. I thought that’s nuts, but right at the 10 hours mark it had reduced beautifully.





To be continued…

[JCBBQ]

It was now time for final assembly. I made one portion- I used 125g of pasta. While the pasta was cooking in very salty water - should taste like the ocean - I chopped up some broccoli rabe, thinly sliced garlic and chopped up some Calabrian chilies. I cooked down the broccoli rabe in evoo added the garlic and chilies. The garlic will disappear bc it’s so thin. Then I added a heaping ladle of the ragu and some of the pasta water and started to cook it together.




I cooked the pasta 75% then added it to the ragu. The last step is the “mantecatura” or glazing. It’s where you see chefs flip the pasta and sauce back on itself. You need to add enough starchy pasta water to loosen it then continue to flip over heat so you continue to cook the pasta and also reduce the liquid to a beautiful glaze. Then off the heat add a lot of Parmesan and mix until it disapears and becomes part of the sauce. Then serve.




Lastly I highly recommend, if you’re not going to make your own pasta, that you get a high quality Italian brand - NOT Barilla. We have a big Italian community in NJ so I can find various brands easily. But if you can’t it’s really worth buying it on Amazon. It really will make your pasta dishes way way better. Here’s what I used.


Thanks and let me know if you try this.

[SheilaAnn]

My first takeaway was green onions!!! Wowza! This looks awesome. Agree on the higher end pasta. For the team cook, BF found the Rummo brand. It was sublime.

[JCBBQ]

SheilaAnn yeah I like Rummo.

[58limited]

Now that looks really good!

[JCBBQ]

Thanks. It was really delicious.

[klflowers]

Even though I don't particularly like you after the f michigan post, this looks pretty good. I'll have to try it if i am successful with the Hazan marathon reduce the sauce session. And I will definitely look into the better pasta suggestion. Never really thought of that before - I always figured most dried pasta was the same.

[JCBBQ]

My son goes to Purdue. We were pretty salty after that first week. 😀. Yes, getting really good pasta Will DRAMATICALLY improve you dish. You’ll finally understand what al dente means.

[shify]

Looks great. And there nothing better than sausage and broccoli rabe. My only nit is that everyone knows you should use a razor blade to slice garlic....

On the topic of sausage ragu - let me also give you a link to my favorite recipe - its from Sara Jenkins. LIke the one you posted, it defies all logic with the way it is cook as well as the time (but much less than 10 hours!!!) but comes out fantastic. I use hot italian sausage as frankly there is nothing sweet italian sausage does that hot italian cant do better. I use a slightly higher heat than recommended but it is one of the family's favorite dishes and is very easy, even though it take quite a while. just made a double batch of it last week (across 2 huge pans for the browning stage to make sure the sausage got appropriately caramelized)

https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1017729-sausage-ragu?unlocked_article_code=1.D1E.IYBn.voSKDMMkB5Jz&smid=share-url

[JCBBQ]

Awesome, thanks!! Yeah I was thinking Goodfellas when I was slicing the garlic 😆

[TripleB]

Looks beautiful. Bet it’s absolutely delicious. Great job.

I buy Barilla all the time. Rated as one of the better dry pastas. I really only use spaghetti noodles. Is the pasta you used dry? What dry spaghetti noodles would you recommend?

[JCBBQ]

Super delicious, thanks. I used to buy Barilla all the time, but since I started buying more artisanal pasta I won’t go back. You’ll be blown away by the difference. Yes the orrecchirtte I used was a dry pasta. I’ll post some recommendations below

[JCBBQ]

TripleB I don’t make a lot of spaghetti but I’ll share 3 great brands. All on Amazon if not available near you.


👆 This is my favorite brand of pasta.


👆 This brand is excellent


👆 I’ve never bought Mancini but I’ve heard it’s good.

Try the Giuseppe Cocco! That’s my recommendation.

[SheilaAnn]

TripleB check Claro’s to see if they have these. I know I will next time I’m there.

[theroc]

TripleB - for something closer to home, Roma Deli in Pasadena carries several brands of excellent Italian pasta made in Gragnano.

[JCBBQ]

Also, TripleB if you like the blue box Barilla, try the red “Al bronze” Barilla. It’s much better imo. Specifically their bucatini since you like spaghetti. I think you’ll like that a lot.

[fzxdoc]

JCBBQ , how much of each ingredient did you use? Did you just estimate based on Secchi's You Tube video?

Kathryn

[JCBBQ]

fzxdoc I eyeballed it but here’s what I used: just under 2.5lbs of sausage. The video calls for 50% of the sausage weight for the prosciutto, but I only used 1/2 lb bc I thought I was gonna use only 1 lb of sausage. I went to market and couldn’t decide if I wanted to go spicy or fennel so I got both. Then I realized I wasn’t gonna eat the unused sausage so I combined them. I used a really good prosciutto so I could’ve used one pound but a lot of prosciutto is too salty (imho) so I’d be wary about the 50%. Again, just my opinion. For the sofrito bianco I used equal parts of the 16oz deli containers. I’m really not sure how much oil I used. Probably at least one of those 16oz containers but I just kept adding oil til it moved freely in the blender. I used 1&1/3 bottles of white wine and approximately 10 cups of stock.

When I made a single portion here’s what I finished it with.

125g pasta. This might be a bit much. Many sources say 100g is a single serving but I was hungry.
1/3 bunch of broccoli rabe - maybe use 1/4 bunch if only using 100g of pasta. 🤷♂️
2/3 extremely thinly sliced clove of garlic (on the bigger size)
3 Calabrian chilies- from a jar. Don’t know how the heat compares with a fresh one. But they weren’t too hot.
A TON of Parmesan - no idea the weight.

I ended up freezing quite a bit. I think it’ll be about 8 or 9 servings total.

[fzxdoc]

Wow, thanks for the details of your ragu adventure. These amounts and proportions will give me a good base from which to work. I appreciate the time you took to write them down for me.

I've never heard of sofrito bianco so am eager to see how it works with the meats. Plus I often put short ribs along with a large porky portion--pork butt and pancetta in ragu, and beef shanks in my sausage ragu. I'm looking forward to tasting an all-pork ragu. After all, the pig is my meaty patronus.🐷 😄

Kathryn

[JCBBQ]

Expecto Patronum!! 🪄🪄🐖🐖

[58limited]

I made this yesterday, I'll post pics later. I haven't actually served it with the pasta because it was late when it finished reducing - I'll serve it tonight. No Broccoli Rabe available here so I'll sub turnip greens. One thing: there was A LOT of oil that accumulated on top (some from the Italian sausage which is homemade and about 75/25 - 80/20 plus a lot of olive oil). I was afraid that the ragu wouldn't reduce with that much oil on top so I skimmed it off and saved it. At the end I tasted the ragu and thought that it was bitter. I added most of the oil back and that took care of it.

[JCBBQ]

That’s interesting

[JCBBQ]

And that’s so cool that you made this. I think turnip green should work. Main thing is you want something bitter to contrast all the richness

[fzxdoc]

It's great that you tried this recipe too. Who woulda thunk about having to add the oil back in.

Not that you need it for this, but often I use the skimmed oil from a braise or browning meat to make a roux for the dish later on, if needed that is. Skimmed oil is so flavorful.

Kathryn