I’ve learned two good tricks in the past week I’d like to pass along. One is for cooking the pasta, the other for cooking the sauce.
First, the pasta. If you have trouble achieving a perfect al dente, give this a try. The trick is from Darina Allen, the noted Irish chef and cookbook author. Bring the water to a boil and add salt as usual. Add the pasta and cook for two minutes. Then move it off the heat, cover the pot and let stand for 8 -10 minutes. Done. I tried it with a little macaroni and, knowing tubular pastas take longer to cook, gave it nine minutes off the heat. It was just right.
The sauce trick is more involved and, frankly, is not what the creator intended. In the current issue of Cook’s Illustrated, Charles Kelsey offers a quick recipe for meat sauce that is supposed to taste as if it simmered for hours, thanks to the use of a panade, a paste of bread and milk, and finely chopped mushrooms. Well, it doesn’t. I followed the instructions to the letter and after the specified thirty minutes, the sauce tasted no more long-simmered than my usual quick sauce and method. Good as it was, even another thirty minutes cooking time didn’t trick my taste buds.
But what I saw very early on is his technique extends, or stretches, the meat enough that only half a pound of ground beef was plenty for enough sauce for two pounds of pasta. Additionally, I can see using this method to shave about half an hour off bolognese sauce, which needs the meat(s) to be broken down very small, a time-consuming step.
The recipe called for a pound of 85% lean ground beef but I only had half a pound. The fat percentage was important because 80% lean made a greasy sauce and 90% produced tough meat. Instead of the food processor, as called for, I wanted to see if a more commonly-found three-cup mini chop would work. I put 4 ounces of ordinary button mushrooms in the bowl, chopped them and transferred them to a plate. I added the bread and 2 tablespoons of milk and pulsed it together.
I don’t keep always keep bread around so I bought one big sandwich roll and used half, about the equivalent of one slice of bread. Leaving the panade in the little workbowl, I added the 8 ounces of beef, which barely fit, but I pulsed on until everything was combined well.
After sauteeing the mushrooms with onion, I added the meat mixture to the pan and was amazed by how much there was and how finely broken down.
This was when I knew I’d be processing for bolognese as well as to reduce my intake of red meat. With a large can of crushed tomatoes and a small one of diced, I ended up with at least the equivalent of three large jars of sauce at a fraction of the price.
Now I’ve got a lot of delicious sauce in the freezer, just waiting for me to use the other new trick up my sleeve to pair it with perfectly al dente pasta.
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