Best Meat Sauce Ever?

Plus: Creamed Mushrooms on Toast, The Upside-Down Citrus Cake Nobody Ate, and Another Glorious Dinner at Bar Bête.

Hey everyone,

The other day I did a Threads (I Threaded?) about how I’ve always made Marcella Hazan’s Bolognese sauce — which is unrivaled, as far as I’m concerned, in the Bolognese department — but that I wanted to try something new and exciting.

Lots of people chimed in suggesting one recipe or another (one close contender: Lidia Bastianich’s) but then someone pointed me towards Samin Nosrat’s Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. In there she has a recipe for a Meat Ragu that comes from a Florentine chef, so it’s technically not a Bolognese (though I just looked and Florence and Bologna are only 50 miles from each other).

The recipe is fascinating not because of the ingredients, all of which are pretty traditional: a soffritto made with onions, carrots, and celery, a pound of beef, a pound of pork, red wine, chicken stock, milk. What makes the recipe fascinating is the technique: unlike most Bolognese recipes where the ingredients just simmer away, Samin has you deeply brown everything first.

You start with the beef: into the pan with some olive oil and you don’t add salt, which would draw out the moisture, you just sizzle sizzle sizzle until it’s deep golden brown all over (like a really good smash burger), breaking it up as you go, and then removing to a bowl. You do the same thing again with the pork.

Finally, you add the soffritto, cover with olive oil, lower the heat, and cook for 30 to 40 minutes until deep brown. Then you add all of that brown meat back and you add red wine (deglazing the bottom of the pan), chicken stock, and whole milk. You can also throw in a few Bay leaves, some freshly grated nutmeg, and a Parmesan rind. You bring to a boil, lower to a simmer, and cook for three hours.

At first it looks awful — a strange spectrum of red, pink, and brown — but eventually things thicken up and it looks incredible. To finish, I boiled some fresh fettuccine from Raffeto’s and stirred it all together.

Craig’s sister had just arrived from Seattle and she was delighted with the results.

Just in terms of pizzazz and razzmatazz, this is easily the best meat sauce (quasi-Bolognese) I’ve ever made. Caramelizing the beef, the pork, and the vegetables takes the flavor quotient up to an eleven. It still gets mellowed a bit by the milk and the stock and the long cooking, but the result is lip-smackingly good. I can’t imagine a better meat sauce.

You can get the recipe here on Samin’s site. (I omitted the orange zest and lemon zest and cinnamon stick, but next time I’ll throw those in for good measure.)

A few days ago, I wanted to whip something up for lunch and all I had in the refrigerator was a lion’s mane mushroom from my CSA, some spring onions (that sprang a bit early?), and some cream.

The result? Creamed mushrooms on toast!

Step one: brown the mushrooms (any mushrooms) in two tablespoons butter + two tablespoons olive oil until they take on a little color. Then throw in your sliced spring onions or scallions with a pinch of salt until they soften.

Pour in enough cream to cover, lower the heat, season with more salt and pepper.

Let that cook down and thicken a bit, then add a ton of chopped herbs (I used parsley and dill).

Stir it all around, taste for seasoning. Then broil some really good bread and spoon the mixture on top and sprinkle with more herbs and some Parmesan. Easiest (and prettiest?) lunch ever.

I was recently accused of using my newsletter to publicly shame those who don’t eat my food.

But imagine somebody makes you Melissa Clark’s upside-down citrus cake for dessert:

(Note: you can leave the skin on the clementines and it’ll hold them together when you slice them thin and it becomes edible after cooking.)

… and then they reveal that they don’t like “the combination of cornmeal and citrus.”

WTH?!

I will not say who this person is but they may have their photograph featured earlier in this newsletter. (Tee-hee.)

Finally, a totally different person, not the person who didn’t eat the citrus cake, Kristin my sister-in-law, wanted to check out our favorite restaurant in the neighborhood, Bar Bête.

We ate all of our usual favorite things — the leek salad, the regular salad with pickled mushrooms and fried shallots, the tuna toast — but the new thing that we tried was the Wagyu beef with blue cheese on it, which was wildly delicious.

And of course, we had to have the yellow cake with chocolate frosting. Here’s Kristin digging in (wow, I guess she likes some cakes more than others!):

Now let’s look at some links:

• If you live in LA, go out and support your favorite restaurants, they’re struggling (Eater LA);

• RIP legendary chef André Soltner, chef/owner of Lutece, who I once spoke to on the phone when I was trying to recruit chefs for my cookbook… he was polite, but ultimately declined (NYT);

• Noel Fielding from GBBO abandoned his own TV show. Not cool, Noel! (Deadline).

That’s all for today, folks!

See you back here on Thursday….

Your pal,

Adam