Cheapest, easiest meaty Italian feast — Sunday sauce

Yeah, a rainy Sunday at the old Reggusia homestead. Let's hop in the kitchen there and make some Sunday sauce. Arguably the easiest and least expensive meat-based feast from the traditional western culinary cannon. If you want to feed meat to a lot of people, or if you want to freeze a bunch of portions for yourself, then you want Sunday sauce. Called that because it needs to cook all day. So, Sunday, get yourself a giant heap of meat suitable for brazing, that is to say, tough, fatty cuts that you have to cook low and slow to soften. You could save scraps in the freezer, or go to your butcher and ask for scraps. I've got beef oxtail here. Anything with bone marrow is especially nice for enriching the sauce. In some hot olive oil, those go. I've got half a rack of pork ribs here. Literally, any big chunks of tough meat will do. And I will season them as I go. Not because this will deposit flavor on the meat. It won't. The meat is going to simmer in sauce all day. So all of this seasoning is going to dissolve right off the meat. The reason I'm seasoning each piece individually anyway is that I'm making a huge volume of food here. And when the volumes get really big, it becomes hard to eyeball the seasoning quantity. If you take it one piece of food at a time, however, you have a sense of how much salt you like on an individual piece of meat. So, if we season everything individually, we should end up with the correct amount of total seasoning at the end. And now that this meat has shrunk a little, I'm going to put in these sausages. I do not want any large areas of empty pan surface. Bare bottoms burn, and I do not want to spoil the flavor of this giant vat of sauce. I may turn the heat down. I don't need to get crazy browning on each piece of meat. Just enough to provide a nice base of flavor for the sauce. And I certainly don't want browning at the cost of scorching the pan. So, out. This is half a leg of lamb that was on crazy sale at the store. Any piece of sheep or goat brings a ton of aromatic short- chain fatty acids to the sauce. Chicken generally gets overcooked in a sauce like this, but if you insist, I would go with whole dark meat pieces like this leg quarter. These can handle a lot of cooking without going too dry. Season, season, season. Brown everything as well as you can without burning the bottom too much. I've got some room in there now, so I'll throw the sausages back in to cover the bottom. They didn't get quite enough browning before. Sausages obviously do not have to be brazed for hours in order to soften, but they're very traditional in Sunday sauce anyways. I think because of the amount of flavor that Italian sausage brings to the sauce. Just think cheap. A pile of cheap meat makes the best Sunday sauce. And if you're looking to save money on everything from food to fuel, consider downloading Upside, sponsor of this video. 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That is the foundation of the sauce. Got to chop up an onion, maybe a carrot if you have one. The chunks can be big cuz they're going to cook for hours. They'll just fall apart. Whole bunch of garlic. Again, the pieces do not have to be small. Back on the heat and into our meat fat goes our onion and carrot. Leave the garlic behind for now. Use the water from the vegetables to deglaze the bottom of the pan before anything burns. Fry the veg until you've got some nice golden browning on the pieces just for flavor. Garlic at the last minute. It only needs a minute. And then we can properly delaze with two big cans of quality crushed tomatoes. Given how long this cooks and how much evaporation we can expect, we're going to need some extra water. So, I'll just rinse out these cans a bit. Throw that in there. Some wine would be nice, too, if you have it. And I really like at least one can of whole tomatoes in this because it's a very chunky dish. I like having some chunks of tomato. Maybe rinse out that can a bit too. Now, we got to season this. I've got some dried Italian herb blend. And then I'll conservatively eyeball salt. Remembering that I only need to salt the tomatoes. The meats are already seasoned. I just want some salt in this liquid because the seasoning is going to equilibrate across all of the mass in the pot over the course of the long cooking. That means that if the sauce is undersalted, the interior of the meat will also be undersalted, no matter how much salt you put on the surface. And that matters because these are big chunks of meat with deep interiors, much like myself. In goes everything. And I do not recommend filling your pot quite this high. When it gets hot, it will expand and risk bubbling over, making a mess. I had a little mess. Regardless, the easiest way to cook this is not on the stove top, but in the oven at a gentle 300F, 150C. You will never have to stir it. You will never have to worry about the bottom burning. You just leave it in there all day until the meats are fork tender. I cooked mine about 6 hours. You could skim some of that fat off the top or blot it up with a paper towel. I'm just going to stir it right back into my sauce as soon as I have all of my meats removed. Look out for any loose bones that could surprise you while you're eating. Give that a stir and it suddenly looks like sauce. Oh, I got to get my riatoni boiling in salted water. I like a chunky pasta shape for this. Now, the thing about brazed meats is they're delicious, but they tend to look like wet mops. We can make this platter much more appetizing by just throwing it back in the oven and turning the heat up to max. Give my sauce a taste. It's going to need some vinegar to brighten it back up after that long cooking where all of the acids neutralized. And I think I could use a big pinch of sugar, but the salt level is perfect. Flavor is outrageous from the sausages especially. I think drain my pasta when it's done. And now my meats should have nice crusts on them. You can shred all of that meat and put it back into the sauce before saucing the pasta. Or you can just sauce the pasta. Maybe put some fresh basil in there. And then everybody just grabs whatever meat chunks they desire. Give me that lamb. I like to do whole meat chunks on the day that I make the sauce. And then I shred up whatever meat remains into the leftover sauce that I then freeze. That is a proper platter of food. I will leave you with my lovely wife Lauren's very sincere reaction when I invited her downstairs to come and eat what I had just filmed. She did not know that the camera was still rolling and she was hungry from the gym. This is the kind of reaction you hope for, isn't it? Holy lord. What? What?