I've been working on this for a while actually, and now I'm ready to release it to the world. this began as an easy dinner option heavy on the leftovers, and evolved into something that's a bit more sophisticated but also mind-blowing. I'm going to give a range of options and you can choose your own level of effort.
this'll keep in the fridge for maybe a week, and it freezes well. part of the goal here is plenty of leftovers, so scale it up as far as your cookware will permit.
if you give this a shot, tag me on twitter (@arachnocapital2) and let me know how it went.
- medium saucepan
- kitchen knife
- potato masher (technically optional, but you want it)
- food mill (definitely optional, but I bought one for this recipe and wasn't disappointed)
- 1 large (28oz / 800ml) can of whole tomatoes, although see below
- 1lb ground pork or italian sausage of your choice (see below)
- 1/2 a medium-large onion, fine diced
- 5+ cloves of garlic, minced
- 1-2tbsp of capers, fine diced
- 2 anchovy filets
- 1 small carrot
- ~2tsp good olive oil
- ~1tbsp tomato paste
- 2 bay leaves
- fish sauce, soy sauce, salt, lemon, MSG to season
if not using store-bought sausage, generous measures of:
- 1tbsp fennel seeds
- 1tsp salt (heaping) (if you're making your own; see below)
- 1tsp red pepper flakes
- 1tsp dry thyme
- 1tsp dry oregano
- 1tsp hot paprika
you could probably go to 1.25x the listed measures and it wouldn't hurt, but "heaping teaspoon/tablespoon" is a good frame of mind
there are options around the tomatoes and the meat, which I'll get into below:
I think this sauce works best with a fairly smooth tomato component, it makes a nice smooth emulsion with the fat and pasta water that coats the noodles well. I've made a lot of it with much chunkier tomatoes, though, and it definitely isn't bad. here's a range of options for the tomato component; whatever you choose, you should end up with roughly three cups / 750ml of tomato stuff. the exact amount isn't super critical but aim for that.
the classy option here is tomato passatta, which takes all the effort-for-quality work I'm going to talk about in below and outsources it to someone else. I've generally tried to make this recipe a) cheap and b) not too demanding on ingredients, so I haven't tried this, but you totally could.
the less classy option is canned crushed or diced tomatoes. I'd stay away from anything that's got stabilizers in it (as many of these do), but if you get crushed tomatoes with an ingredient list that looks like "tomatoes (maybe salt)" it wouldn't be bad. it'd be worth the effort to fish out any bits of skin or stem, though.
it's usually easier to find higher-quality whole canned tomatoes ("san marzano DOP" is the key phrase) than crushed or diced, and it's worth your while to look for some (or stock up when they go on sale). there's a few different ways you can treat these tomatoes, with increasing levels of effort for increasing reward.
- you can pour the tomatoes into the sauce and break them up with a potato masher. this risks leaving unpleasant bits of tomato skin or stems / woody bits in your finished sauce, but it's easy as heck. I've probably done this more than any other approach, and it leaves you with a perfectly good sauce
- you can pour the tomatoes into a mixing bowl, fish around for woody bits and scraps of skin and remove those, and then add them to the sauce and potato-masher them. this'll give you way better results than not caring about those bits at all, with relatively large ("rustic") chunks of tomato that may or may not stick to your pasta all that well
- for a fair bit of extra effort and very good results, you can run the tomatoes through a food mill (medium disc) into a side bowl after the potato-masher step (don't bother fishing around, the food mill will do that for you). this adds, I dunno, five or six minutes of extra prep (and generates another thing to wash) but leaves you with a very smooth sauce that doesn't have any seeds in it as well as no skins or stems. this has a heck of a return on investment for not that much extra time spent in prep, although if you dread ending up with Yet Another thing to wash it might not be a good tradeoff. (or, if your budget approves, use store-bought passata)
this is essentially a pork sausage red sauce. how you get to that pork sausage is up to you:
I guess you don't need to use Italian sausage but you probably should, the key there is the fennel. anyway, if you can get good, cased or loose, Italian sausage -- or you found a bunch of it on sale -- that'll work fine. the sausage is the biggest flavour component, though, so the better your sausage the better your results.
cased sausage tends to be more expensive than ground pork, which is one of the cheapest meats around in my market, so I tend to buy that and do the rest myself. this also lets me play with the spice blend rather than just accept whatever the butcher used. for this method I take 1tbsp fennel seeds and 1tsp each of dry thyme, dry oregano, red pepper flakes, and hot paprika (you could use sweet or smoked paprika instead, but maybe add more pepper flakes to get the heat up) and sizzle them in oil with the garlic before adding liquid. this'll give good results, although what you end up with is "ground pork cooked with Italian sausage spices".
this isn't as scary as it sounds, it just takes a bit of planning and eats up space in your fridge for a couple days. basically, you toast the spices I mentioned above in a dry pan until they smell really good, then thoroughly mix that and a heaping teaspoon of salt into your ground pork. mixing the pork will bond some of the meat's proteins together (vaguely like gluten formation in a wheat dough) and that'll give it more of a sausage-like texture. to develop the flavour, put it in a sealed container or ziploc bag and let it sit in the fridge for a couple days. I expected this to be a fussy step that made the end result slightly better; in the end it made the end result an awful lot better. recommended
I'm going to describe the highest-effort, highest-quality method first, and then talk about a couple ways to dial it back.
two+ days before cooking:
- toast the fennel seeds, red pepper flakes, thyme, and oregano in a dry pan over medium-low heat until intensely fragrant, about five to ten minutes
- add salt, maybe 10-20 grinds of black pepper, and hot paprika and mix thoroughly with ground pork
- put pork spice mixture in an airtight container or ziploc bag. place in the fridge for about two days, probably no more than four
- using a food mill with the medium disc, purée a 28oz/800ml can of whole tomatoes into a mixing bowl. rinse out the can with a few tablespoons of cold water and run that through the food mill to get all the tomato without seeds. scrape the milled tomato from the underside of the food mill into the bowl; discard the seeds and skin in the mill (or save it for a science project, idk)
- place a 2qt/8l saucepan over medium heat and add the olive oil, then add the onion, anchovies, and a big pinch of salt. break up anchovies and cook the onion until translucent, about 5-8min
- add tomato paste and let it cook, not stirring, until it's browned to the bottom of the saucepan a little, 2-3min
- add garlic and cook, stirring frequently, until the raw garlic aroma is gone, about 1min
- add puréed tomato to the saucepan, followed by capers
- grate the carrot into the sauce on a medium-fine microplane, or use the fine side of a box grater; you should end up with about 1/4cu to 1/3cu of carrot. up to 1/2cu is probably fine but I wouldn't go further
- add Bay leaves, and raise heat to medium-high
- add the pork sausage to the sauce in small chunks. stir until meat is fully submerged
- once the mixture returns to a simmer, reduce heat to low (you want to keep a gentle simmer) and cook, scraping the sides occasionally as liquid evaporates and leaves thickened sauce behind, until the meat is very tender, about 1-1.5h. start testing the meat for tenderness after (say) 45min and then again every 15-20min. the chunks should break apart easily with a spoon
- using a potato masher, break up the meat into small pieces. exactly how small is up to you but generally the smaller the better
- stir in 1/2tsp MSG, then season for salt with fish sauce, soy sauce, and then regular salt as needed. you want this to be slightly overseasoned on its own because you'll serve it over pasta
- squeeze in juice from one slice of lemon (about 1/6th of a whole lemon) to taste, for brightness
- add ~230ml of cold water and a big pinch of salt to a small saucepan. heat over high until water is boiling vigorously
- add ~75g fusilli to the saucepan, stir to prevent sticking, and boil until the water is mostly evaporated and a few teaspoons are left, 6-8 minutes
- reduce heat to medium and ladle in ~6oz/180ml pasta sauce, stirring thoroughly to combine. the extra-starchy remaining pasta water and the fat from the sauce (we didn't skim any of that!) should form an emulsion
- once the liquid has reduced to your satisfaction (scraping a spoon across the bottom of the saucepan should leave a track that takes several seconds to fill), remove from the heat and grate in "a bunch" of parmigiano reggiano cheese, stirring thoroughly to mix
- serve in a warmed bowl, topped with more cheese and minced parsley or (if you have it) fresh basil
if you don't have the time or the energy to put a lot of effort into this, you can get a long way with just the onion, sausage, and a can of crushed tomatoes. this is essentially how the dish started for me and it worked out pretty ok for months before I started adding to it. the key here is to get aggressive and creative with the seasonings at the end; use red wine or balsamic vinegar as well as lemon, lean on the extra complexity and umami you get from fish sauce and soy sauce instead of just using salt to season for taste, maybe add your favourite hot sauce or some miso paste to compensate for the ingredients you didn't use
if you're going with plain ground pork rather than buying or making a sausage, you can still get pretty damn good flavours. the key there is to toast the spices in the oil before adding liquid, and this makes the thing we didn't do -- skim any of the fat -- extra important, because the oil will have a ton of flavour from those spices in it. because the pork won't have the extra structure that you'd get from a (mixed) sausage, you might let it cook until it's very soft and use that texture to your advantage in breaking it up really finely.
if you aren't making a fridge sausage, you probably aren't pulling out the food mill either. in that case, pour your tomatoes into a mixing bowl (a deep sixth pan is great for this), break it up there with a potato masher, and run your fingers through the result to pick out woody bits of stem and skins before pouring it into the saucepan. you'll still end up with a bunch of seeds, which isn't a big deal until you've spoiled yourself with a sauce that doesn't have them, but it's well worth the effort.
2022-06-05: initial version
2022-07-12: increased quantities of most aromatics and spices; put pepper in sausage rather than sauce; guidance around storing sausage and using food mill