Iron Recipe: Tomato Sauce Round #1: This Cook's Story

THE RECIPE

Basic Tomato Sauce

Mario Batali courtesy of The Food Network

Ingredients

¼ cup extra-virgin olive oil

¼ Spanish onion, ¼ inch dice

arlic cloves, peeled and thinly sliced

3 tablespoons chopped fresh thyme leaves, or 1 tablespoon dried

½ medium carrot, finely grated

2 (28 ounce) cans peeled whole tomatoes, crushed by hand and juices reserved

Salt

Spaghetti, cooked al dente

Whole basil leaves, for garnish

Grated Parmesan, (optional)

THIS COOK’S STORY

Celery, and Carrots, and Sugar! Oh, My!

Yes, I have made tomato sauce before. No, I have never used celery, carrots or sugar in my recipe despite being advised I should include one or more of these in varying combinations. I’ve also never really enjoyed my tomato sauce. My problem is definitely a lack of seasoning and I now accept that adding copious amounts of hot pepper flakes (yes, I’ve done this and pretended I was making fra-diavolo) is not the solution. So, I decided to set out on a mission to find a recipe that is easy to follow and tastes good.

And thus was established: IRON RECIPE

In IRON RECIPE I will take a staple dish and try 3 different celebrity chef recipes to find the best one. Each chef’s recipe will be its own post and once I have tried all 3 I will blog a Results Post that outlines the winner of that edition of IRON RECIPE. Recipes will be judged on three main criteria:

· Ingredients (ease of understanding, buying & preparing)

· Instructions (can I understand and easily follow)

· Does it taste good? (I think you get this one)

As you can see, the first edition of IRON RECIPE will be tomato sauce and the three contenders for the title are: Mario Batali, Giada De Laurentiis and Emeril Lagasse. Each of their recipes incorporates one or more of the 3 ingredients I’ve been told about but never used: celery, carrots & sugar. First up, it’s Mario---let’s see whatya got!

This recipe, like all others, began with a trip to the grocery store. Luckily, these ingredients were easy to find and some I even had at home. As I quickly identified the Spanish onions (bonus points to Mario for listing the species in his recipe) I did have some concerns that they were all VERY large. But, he’s the boss, so I picked up a not so big, big one and plopped it in my basket.

I headed to the register, fairly confident I had thyme at home, but decided at the last minute that I better get it just to be safe. Bear in mind, this happens to me often, which is why I have two bottles of several very un-useful spices. I arrive at the spice section and….well, let’s just say, what I thought would be a quick pit stop, turned into a mini debacle. There are multiple brands of spices and each brand has not only different spices but different versions of different spices. Case & point:

The Spice Hunter brand had French Thyme. What is French Thyme? Is it from France? Does it matter where thyme is grown? Is France synonymous with thyme? Did Italian Mario want me to buy French Thyme? Doesn’t matter, because they’re out of it.

Simply Organic brand seemed to run out of spices after the ‘P’s’ (at least spices are in alphabetical order). This was a double bummer since I liked the little mini size containers they have because really, how am I going to ever use a giant bottle of thyme?

McCormick’s Gourmet Collection had Ground Thyme. This, I could tell was different than the others because it was ground up into a powder. Hmmm…the recipe does talk about fresh thyme vs. dried. I assumed fresh was leaves in the produce section, but what does thyme look like in its natural, plucked from the earth state? Is it a leaf? Are the not ground versions of thyme, dried and just not ground? Or are they fresh?

Lots of questions, not so sure about the answers so I go with the giant bottle of Simply Organic, plain, old ‘Thyme.’ But hey, wait a minute Simply Organic, why did you stop making little bottles of things after the ‘P’s’ and then decide to have a whole other section with giant bottles of spices that could clearly have been alphabetized in the short bottle section? An enigma wrapped in a puzzle, shrouded in mystery. And so shall it remain.

By the way, you’re welcome for the pics. And yes, it is extremely awkward to take photos of SPICE RACKS at the grocery store on my iphone---I look like a crazy lady. But I aim to please…

I’m back at home, I’ve poured myself a glass of wine, Sole Beech 2009 Sauvignon Blanc, and now it’s time to prep the ingredients.

(Note: Moving forward, I’ll be listing the wines I drink while cooking since it’s only fitting I credit the culinary assistants that get me safely through every dish I attempt.)

I knew the onion would be the most difficult (hello, knife skills) so I tackled that first. OK, wow, this onion is HUGE. I am meant to dice it into ¼ inch pieces and put them and 4 cloves of garlic into my 3-quart saucepan. Crap, I smell a quantity and volume problem rearing its ugly head again. But, I’m not too concerned with the size of the onion precisely because of my lack of culinary knowledge and knife skills. You see, I don’t know the proper procedures for peeling or cutting ANYTHING. So, I employ, what I call the ‘hack and peel’ method (an epicurean cousin of the slash and burn technique). This consists of me hacking off both ends of something and then peeling off as many layers as I can with the help of my knife tip and my bare hands. Since I never know how much to hack or how much to peel I overdo both to err on the side of having too little of something good instead of too much of something bad. This results in me reducing the quantity of a raw ingredient by at least a quarter. I thought this would finally prove helpful in the giant Spanish onion quandary.

But, from the pics, you can see it wasn’t. The onion was so big that I actually didn’t even cut the whole thing as it appeared I was cutting up enough onion to make onion stew as opposed to tomato sauce. The actual dicing…I’m not even going to speak of that. You can see for yourself.

Garlic next. Again, I employ the hack and peel technique, which I’m almost certain is not correct since it takes about 5 to 7 minutes for me to peel 4 cloves (not slice them, just peel them). Slicing is an easier concept for me than dicing, so this worked out fairly well. Except for one thing. I get to the end and I can’t hold what’s left of the clove and slice without cutting myself…let’s call it the garlic nub…so I just cut that nub into little pieces. But I trudge on, slicing 4 cloves and chopping 4 nubs. Mission accomplished.

The tomatoes are next & then its time to cook--wahoo! Oops wait, gotta do the carrot. How could I forget the carrot?! Ok, Mario is asking for half of a medium sized carrot. While I was pleasantly surprised that you can buy loose carrots at the grocery store (which enabled me to buy 1 instead of a bag of 1000) AND that these said, loose carrots come in sizes where I could pretty easily delineate a ‘medium’ member of the pack, I was at a standstill by the ‘half.’ A carrot isn’t an even shaped vegetable. The top half is way fatter than the bottom. Which half to use? This decision will affect the quantity of carrot—something I don’t want to mess up. So what do I do? The only logical thing---I slice that baby down the middle. I don’t know if this is the right thing to do, but I suspect it’s not. Oh well, I go with it and am quite proud of myself for thinking of it.

I’m also not exactly sure what finely grated is, so I just shred it on my big cheese grater. I picked the medium size grater side since the last time I tried to do the tiny one with a lemon, it was impossible to get the rind out of the metal. This seems ok, although I don’t ever remember eating tomato sauce with shredded carrot in it---and is shredded carrot different than grated carrot? Most decidedly it is, but unable to deal with that at the moment, I simply move on.

Tomatoes!!! Yay, the main ingredient of my sauce, finally! I’ve never hand crushed whole peeled tomatoes. And even though Mario does not tell me HOW to hand crush my tomatoes, I will overlook his lack of detail because the idea of hand crushing anything sounds kind of fun. I decide on using a potato masher (which I have to take out of the packaging because I wasn’t kidding when I said I’d never peeled a potato before the frittata). It seems to work really well and I’m feeling good about my main ingredient. Nice.

Time to get the pot, hot. Sounds like a cute little rhyming phrase, right? Wrong. I think this is also a big issue I have…lack of patience. I throw the pot on the stove, turn it on and pour the oil in. Here’s where I need 2 things: patience and more guidance from my recipe authors. Mario, you say to heat the oil over medium heat and then put in the first ingredients. But how long do I heat it? How LONG?

I wait about t-minus :45 and throw in the onions and garlic. Wow, that’s a lot of onions. I don’t even put all of them in. Mistake? Remains to be seen.

I cook those for a while, a little longer than Mario suggested (I think, it always takes me longer because of my lack of patience and insistence of throwing things in before the pot is heated) but not too wildly off clock. I then put in the thyme & carrots and keep on trucking. This recipe is pretty simple and it’s going well. Although, I do wonder why it’s taking so long to come to a boil. Well, genius, maybe it’s because in order for it to actually boil, you have to turn the temperature up on the stove. Even if Mario doesn’t say ‘raise heat & bring to a boil’? Yes, dummy. So, I bring it to a boil by turning it up and then lower it to a simmer. Seems fine, but wait, why is it not even that hot about 20 minutes in to the simmer? Maybe its because the stove unlit (I have no idea how) at some point. Great, this has been sitting on a mildly hot burner with no heat for god knows how long. So, I cook it 20 minutes longer than 30 and call it a day. It looks sort of the consistency of hot cereal when I’m done…if by hot cereal Mario means oatmeal, which I think he does.

To complete my meal, I employ his technique for putting the sauce & spaghetti into a pan, toss it & serve it up in a bowl. Now for the taste test…OMG, this actually tastes good! I did it, I made a sauce that tastes seasoned and GOOD!

Success is mine! But will it be Mario’s? Only IRON RECIPE will tell. Stay tuned for Emeril’s tomato sauce, which is up next. But don’t hold your breath, it could be a while. I have a lot of Mario’s in my fridge/freezer….