I’m making bolognese for the first time today, and I’m really excited and hope I can nail it. However, I’ve been sober for 2 years now, and I guess I don’t trust myself to buy wine or have it in my pantry. I do, however have good old Holland House cooking sherry. Could I sub the wine for sherry in a 1:1? Or is there a better alternative? I almost bought wine but…idk it’s just a mental thing I guess.

I'm fascinated by italian cooking so my girlfriend got me a cookbook of none other than Marcella Hazan!

I've made her famous tomato sauce and bolognese in the past and they were amazing!!

So I was wondering, what other recipes by Marcella Hazan are a must to make?

I'm deciding on which Italian cookbook to get and I am deciding between these two. Which one do you prefer and why?

I’ve made Marcella Hazan’s Bolognese Sauce (famous recipe in NYT cooking) several times and it’s been great. In now have a pack of ground bison that I need to use, and wondered if I could use that in place of the beef. Would it be terrible?

UPDATE: thanks for all the advice. I did it, adding a extra half tablespoon or so of bacon fat. Overall, I would say it was good, not great. It was enjoyable and everyone liked it, but it lacked the sort of amazing luxuriousness of the beef version.

So, not a disaster at all, but next time I spend 8 hours making sauce I’ll probably go for the beef.

Hey everyone, looking for a little advice here as my sauce has been simmering away now for close to 12 hours. I tripled/quadrupled Hazan's classic recipe (version in the NYT) and it took absolutely forever to get the milk and the wine to boil off. Added the tomatoes about an hour ago but now that it's 1 in the morning I'm not sure what I've gotten myself into. So, hoping to get some advice.

The sauce is going to be served on a camping trip tomorrow, so it does not need to be rushed. But I am tired and want to go to sleep soon. Is it ok to pull the sauce early, refrigerate, and finish simmering the next day? Also, it currently looks very thick and tastes quite good, but doesn't have that fat/meat separation I see in a lot of photos--is that normal? I feel like I've already simmered the thing way too long. Worried it's just going to be textureless.

Thanks all for any tips or advice

The onion is halved then cooked with the tomatoes for only 45 minutes. Wouldn't a fine dice be more effective for extracting the onion's flavor? If the worry is separating the small cuts of onion from the sauce, wrapping the small diced onion in cheesecloth would probably do the trick.

https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1015178-marcella-hazans-tomato-sauce

Admittedly, I'm a new cook and since I have all the time in the world right now I wanted to make a fresh bolognese sauce. After much research and glowing recommendations for Marcella's recipe, I'm sold. It sounds delicious.

My only hesitation here is that there are some negative reviews and they mostly pertain to it being bland, whilst some people correlate that to the reviewers being more use to an American style bolognese. Since I'm making this dish for both my boyfriend and myself, is there anything I can add that will make it more flavourful and a kind of best of both worlds situation? I've looked at a ton of different reviews who use chicken liver, pancetta, bay leaf, etc but since I have little experience I have no idea what to do.

Been revisiting Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking lately, and am reminded that she has a few braised pork chop dishes in there. I remember trying one of these years ago with some really nice pork, and the result was as near to shoe leather as I have ever experienced. What's the deal? Can they be made to work?

The exact quote from her Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking is

>Cook the meat in milk before adding wine and tomatoes to protect it from the acidic bite of the latter

First I'm a bit baffled that the wine isn't supposed to be reduced before adding other liquids. Wouldn't the sauce end up with a strong alcohol taste? The wine called for is dry white wine.

Also is there any evidence that milk can "protect" meat from acid, whatever this means?

This is probably a silly question, but I‘m brand new to cooking. The recipe (the one that’s just tomatoes, butter, an onion, and salt) calls for an onion, halved, but doesn’t specify what kind. I’ve looked at a bunch of different sites that have the recipe (and even some posts on this sub) but no one seems to say. If there is no specific type, which would likely work best? Thank you!

Straight to the important part, pictures: http://imgur.com/a/KKYRVgA

I have wanted to put Beyond ground "beef" to the test with Bolognese sauce for a long time, and yesterday I decided to do it. On the blog/recipe sphere, I see a lot of vegetarian and vegan adaptations of Bolognese and the vast majority tend to go off the rails with unnecessary ingredients (well, less unnecessary if vegan) and preparation methods. The question I wanted to answer was, "Can a classic Bolognese recipe taste comparable when swapped with plant-based meat?"

The very short answer is yes, and I'm sure it would be fine if the only adjustment you made was swapping the meat. However - there are two main problems I notice when cooking with plant based ground beef: fat rendering and rich flavor. If you ever scan the back of a Beyond Beef package, the macronutrient composition is almost identical to 80/20 ground beef. Texturally, the stuff definitely holds up.

To compensate for the fat rendering (or lack thereof) as well as rich flavor I made three adjustments to Marcella's recipe:

• One clove of garlic, very finely minced, added at the end of soffritto sweating. This decision was less about adding garlic to the overall flavor profile than intensifying the other flavors in the dish, which I find garlic does very well in small quantities.

• When sauteeing the Beyond beef, I added three tbsp of tomato paste. If you've ever eaten Beyond beef, it has a faint coconut flavor. Adding tomato early, especially paste, was an attempt to block that flavor note from overpowering the more delicate soffritto, as well as adding some of that glutamate goodness early. Also - I found the tomato paste helped make the soffritto and beef juicier as it broke down in the pot, potentially compensating for some of the loss of fat rendering.

• Speaking of glutamates, I added one medium sized parmesan rind with the 1 1/2 cup of tomatoes just before simmering. I know some new age Bolognese recipes call for fish sauce (Kenji) and other umami boosters, but I wanted to preserve Marcella's recipe as carefully as possible. That meant not just throwing in any flavor enhancer I could think of.

I served with penne because I didn't have any tagliatelle, so you could say that alone made this a bastardized ragù ;)

Overall - a delicious meal, served alongside a simple mâche green salad dressed with a lemon vinaigrette to cut through some of the sauce's richness. I'd recommend this plant-based adaptation for anyone

Hi all, I'm very new to canning. The BIGGEST reason I want to begin is so that I can preserve Marcella Hazan's amazing tomato sauce recipe: https://food52.com/recipes/13722-marcella-hazan-s-tomato-sauce-with-onion-butter

Now, from what I've read, you have to be careful of what recipes you use to can so that it is preserved safely. All the tomato sauce recipes I've seen for canning use only tomatoes with nothing else added. Is this safe to can with butter and onion being added to it like in this recipe? NOTE: it directs you to take the onion out, but I would like to puree it into the sauce.

Would pureeeing onion into the sauce make it unsafe to can for any reason? Or, if I just take the onion out of the sauce at the end as directed, would that work? And can I use either the hot water bath or pressure canner method for it?

Thanks so much for the help everyone!

Recipe for pasta (2 servings): https://www.realordinaryfood.com/playing-with-handmade-spinach-pici-pasta/

Recipe for sauce (4 servings): https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1015178-marcella-hazans-tomato-sauce

Ingredients

Pasta:

• 180 g baby spinach
• 100 g durum semolina flour (sub more all purpose flour if you don’t have this)
• 200 g all purpose flour
• salt
• sauce of choice (I used 1/2 cup tomato sauce, below)

Tomato sauce:

• 2 cups tomatoes, in addition to their juices (for example, a 28-ounce can of San Marzano whole peeled tomatoes)
• 5 tablespoons butter
• 1 onion, peeled and cut in half
• Salt

Instructions

1. Tomato sauce (if you don't have sauce on hand, I recommend starting it first since it takes almost an hour to simmer):
2. Combine the tomatoes, their juices, the butter and the onion halves in a saucepan. Add a pinch or two of salt.
3. Place over medium heat and bring to a simmer. Cook, uncovered, for about 45 minutes. Stir occasionally, mashing any large pieces of tomato with a spoon. Add salt as needed.
4. Discard the onion before tossing the sauce with pasta. This recipe makes enough sauce for a pound of pasta.

Pasta:

1. Puree the spinach in a blender or food processor until very fine. Don’t add any water!
2. Pour spinach puree into the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the dough hook, then add the two flours.
3. Start mixing on low speed.
4. As mixture comes together, bring it up a notch and continue kneading on the second speed setting for 3–5 minutes. If it still looks very crumbly and dry after 1 minute, add 1–2 tsp of water. By the end of kneading, the spinach pici dough should be fairly smooth and very tacky.
5. Lightly dust a work surface (a large chopping board works great) and your hands with flour.
6. Remove the dough ball from the bowl and place it on the floured surface, flattening it slightly.
7. Slice the dough in two with a knife. If you’re making just one serving, wrap up one piece in plastic wrap and store it in the fridge to use tomorrow.
8. Take one piece of dough and slice off a thin (about finger-width) strip. Slice this strip into small pieces the size of your thumb.
9. Roll each piece out between fingers and work surface into a long thin noodles. Use your judgment and preference in deciding how thin to make them, keeping in mind they expand to almost double the size after cooking.
10. Bring a pot of water to the boil, then add 1 1⁄2 tsp of kosher salt and bring the heat down to simmering (medium hea