♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ - This week on Milk Street, we're going to investigate pasta with red sauce to see if there's anything new.

Well, it turns out that spaghetti and meatballs actually comes from Abruzzo.

They make it with polpette, little tiny meatballs.

It's not just a made-up American thing.

And next, we're going to take a look at a great pasta dish called pasta all'assassina-- assassin's pasta-- which is actually pasta in red sauce cooked like risotto in a skillet.

It's just an amazing dish.

And, finally, we're going to end up with a slow-cooked ragu from Campania.

So please stay tuned with us right here on Milk Street as we take a fresh look at pasta with red sauce.

♪ ♪ - Funding for this series was provided by the following.

♪ ♪ - Real Italians don't eat spaghetti and meatballs.

Or so goes the mythology that most of us grew up with.

Now, that's because in southern Italy, pasta is considered a first course, and large meatballs are considered a second course.

Most culinary historians credit the marriage of spaghetti and meatballs to those southern Italian immigrants who came to the United States by the millions starting around the mid-1800s.

The New World offered more abundant meat and money, making it easier for this pricey pairing.

But that's not really where our story begins.

And my first lesson, though, didn't come from a cook.

It came from a woodworker.

- (speaking Italian): (strums chitarra strings) - Giovanni makes chitarres-- Italian for guitar.

But this is not a musical instrument.

Rather, it's a tool used to make a rough-hewn, spaghetti-like pasta of the same name.

It's the spaghetti in our spaghetti and meatballs.

(indistinct chatter) ♪ ♪ - (speaking Italian): ♪ ♪ (strums chitarra strings) ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ (twangs) (bells tolling) ♪ ♪ (sizzling) - (speaking Italian): - (speaking Italian): ♪ ♪ - Pasta alla chitarra con pallottine is the original spaghetti and meatballs.

But it's not quite the same dish that we know.

And it all starts with those meatballs.

♪ ♪ Now, the important thing to know about the meatballs that are paired with pasta in Abruzzo is that they are very small, and this has a whole bunch of benefits.

One of them being that the recipe doesn't need a panade.

Now, a panade is usually either bread or bread crumbs, and it does a couple of things.

It retains moisture, and it acts as a binder to hold them together.

But because Abruzzian meatballs are so small, they don't need that.

To make our meatballs, we're going to whisk an egg, and we're going to add a pound of meat.

Now, we like to use meatloaf mix.

The thing I love about this recipe is the first time I tasted it, it, like, brought me back to childhood memories of spaghetti and meatballs.

You go all over Italy looking for this mythical dish, and you think, well, is it gonna disappoint me?

And you quickly realize that this is where it came from, and we've held true to it here just in a different sort of way.

Okay, we're gonna set that aside and move on to our sauce.

What I love about this sauce is its simplicity.

But in its simplicity, there's a whole bunch of steps that are built in to amplify the flavor.

So we're gonna start off by heating a little bit of olive oil, and to that, we're going to add what's called a sofrito.

Now, as this gets going, we're going to add the second flavor enhancer, and that is a little bit of tomato paste.

And the way you're going to know that you're doing it right is that it's going to look like you're doing it wrong.

I'm going to add a third of a cup of our meatball mixture right to the pot, and I'm going to cook it just like I'm doing with the tomato paste.

I'm going to let it stick and brown to the bottom of the pot.

What's great about adding just a little bit of that meatball mixture is it's kind of doing an instant ragu.

All right, time to add our tomatoes.

And I gotta tell you, you're gonna think I'm lying to you, but even in Italy, they use canned tomatoes because they are reliably good all year.

So we like to use canned tomatoes just like Italian grandmothers do.

We're going to bring this to a simmer and let it cook for about half an hour.

You know, the sofrito really is such an important base for both this sauce and so many other Italian, that we decided to play around and see the best way of preparing a sofrito.

♪ ♪ - A sofrito is a blend of vegetables that are the building blocks of a lot of different cuisines.

In our spaghetti and meatballs recipe, it was celery, carrots, and onions.

That is very typical of a lot of Italian sauces and dishes.

These vegetables become the flavor base of whatever you're cooking.

So to make a fine dice, we've got the celery stalk here.

You just wanna cut into batons, turn them the opposite direction, and give them the chop.

They don't have to be perfect.

It all tastes the same, as my mother says.

Carrots, very much the same thing.

That little piece can be a snack.

And then again cut through even with planks.

You can stack them up and cut again into matchsticks.

Turn sideways, just like the celery, and give it a quick chop.

And then, finally, onion.

Give yourself a nice flat surface down on the board.

I like to cut through the onion horizontally.

Now turn it the opposite direction.

Take your knife and go straight down, but not all the way through the far end.

And again turn that sideways and give it a chop.

Onion.

So, yes, making hand chopped sofrito can be a little tedious.

But we thought, why don't we try to employ some of our modern kitchen appliances?

We brought out the food processor to try some sofrito.

So all we really did was take the same amount of celery, carrots, onions, and then pulse it in the processor until it's roughly chopped to the same size.

Yes, easier.

Ten times faster.

But you can see the difference here.

We found that the sofrito made in the food processor actually had a bit of a bitter taste.

The oxidation that happens when you mash down vegetables with a sharp blade like that will definitely change the flavor.

Sofrito that is hand chopped is much sweeter.

You retain the flavor of the vegetable.

And since those are the building blocks of our sauces, we want to really coax out the best flavor we can.

The good news here about sofrito, though, is you can make this ahead.

To make a batch of sofrito, pour about two tablespoons of olive oil into a large saucepan.

Add a finely diced carrot, one stalk of celery, and one onion and cook it until it begins to sizzle.

Put the lid on and cook it very low and slow for about 45 minutes until those vegetables are very soft.

Now you want to let it cool down.

You can store it in an airtight container either in the refrigerator for about a week or in the freezer.

So if JM's recipe for spaghetti and meatballs is making you hungry, do yourself a favor.

You can make a batch of sofrito ahead of time, and then you can throw that sauce together and make those beautiful little mini meatballs in a flash.

♪ ♪ - Time to make some meatballs.

Now, meatballs in Abruzzo are usually no larger than about half an inch or maybe half a teaspoon.

One cook I worked with told me that her mother was so skilled at making this dish that she could make hundreds of meatballs all about a quarter of an inch big.

She felt that was beyond her skills, and I definitely know it's beyond my skills.

Now, while we wait for our sauce to be ready, I'm gonna pop these in the fridge until we need them.

Chilling the meatballs, firms them up a little bit, makes sure that they hold together when they're cooking.

So after about 30 minutes, our sauce will be ready.

It will be slightly reduced and nice and thick.

So now we take our chilled meatballs and we add them, just dropping them into our sauce.

Now, just as important as the size of the meatballs is the pasta that's used.

Now, the name of the dish is chitarra.

It means this funky little pasta making device.

(strums chitarra strings) Chitarra also refers to the pasta that you make using the device.

It squares off the edges of the pasta and gives them a really rough edge.

Now, that rough surface is going to do two things when we're cooking it.

First of all, it's going to help the sauce cling to the pasta.

And, of course, we want as much sauce on our pasta as we can get.

The other thing it's going to do is leach more of the starch from the flour into the sauce and into the cooking water.

And as we know, the starch in pasta helps thicken the sauce, give it that kind of velvety texture that we want.

So we are going to cook our pasta only just barely.

We're not even taking it to al dente, because we're going to finish cooking the pasta in the sauce itself.

So we've undercooked our pasta maybe five to seven minutes total, which is well shy of al dente.

Now, finishing the pasta in the sauce is really important because it's going to give the pasta the opportunity to absorb flavor instead of just water.

It's going to absorb some of that tomato base, and that's going to be great.

(sighs) That is amazing.

This smells like Italy on a plate.

And that is the original spaghetti and meatballs.

After three or five minutes, it's time to eat.

Let's make sure we get a meatball in every bite.

Mmm!

It just perfectly captures everything we love about this dish.

Slightly different form, but all the flavors we know and love.

It's rich, it's bright, it's bold, it's tomatoey, it's... (sighs) It's so good.

♪ ♪ You know, I've been doing this for 45 years.

Hey, it's my 45th anniversary.

And it's not that often I come across a recipe that really stuns me.

It's like a whole technique I've never seen before.

And what it is is-- are you ready for this-- spaghetti that's cooked like risotto.

And you end up with a slightly charred flavor of tomato sauce and a little bit of crispiness with the pasta.

It's absolutely amazing.

So the first thing we're going to do is measure out three cups of hot water.

Now, if you're used to making risotto, you know you have hot stock, right?

So we're gonna add this hot water to the sauce.

I'm gonna add just a little bit to start.

And I'm gonna add tomato paste to dissolve, a little sugar, teaspoon of salt, and half a teaspoon of pepper.

So we're gonna mix this up.

Once I dissolve the tomato paste and the sugar, I'll add the rest of the water, Quarter cup of olive oil, garlic, red pepper flakes.

Now, the other issue here is I'm right and everybody else here is wrong.

In general, I don't mince or chop garlic.

I know we want the full flavor in this, and it makes sense to me.

I tend to slice garlic because I want slightly milder garlic flavor.

But this is a case with assassina where it's full-tilt flavor.

And I understand you're gonna use minced garlic to bring out more garlic flavor, which is fine, but I'm still right.

Okay, we're gonna start off with about three-quarter cup of liquid.

And now we're gonna take the pasta before it starts absorbing the liquid.

It barely fits in the pan.

And I wanna press it down.

Because I want to make sure that pasta is in contact with the tomato sauce and the olive oil and the garlic, et cetera.

I have to say, this does not look like it's gonna turn out well.

This is like someone who was just having a little fun with me, right?

Now I'm gonna add just a little bit more liquid.

I'm also gonna start turning the pasta over.

So another reason this is kind of an odd recipe, normally we talk about high-quality pasta, bronze die extruded, a rough outer surface, a lot of starch is released during cooking.

This is a case where we're not looking for that starch release.

So you can use, you know, a Teflon die extrusion pasta, which means a less expensive pasta, and it's fine.

So we're almost ready to flip the pasta.

Can I flip the pasta?

(laughs) Add a little more tomato sauce to it.

You know, the first time I saw pasta in a skillet was in 1964, something like that.

We were in Rome and they came out and finished the dish by the table, and they had the pasta that was almost al dente, and they had the sauce, and they finished it in the skillet right at the table.

And I remember, oddly enough, at that tender age, thinking, "Oh, that's, that's different."

Because I was used to going to a restaurant like Mamma Leone's near Times Square, where you get a big pile of pasta, and they pour this big wet tomato sauce on top.

And the sauce and the pasta never went together and kind of slid off.

But the idea of cooking the sauce in a skillet with the pasta or in the cooking pot is how you integrate, you emulsify the sauce and the pasta.

This really takes that idea to the nth degree, right?

So just like risotto, we keep adding warm liquid to the pan, about a cup each time.

And we're gonna keep doing this until the pasta is actually cooked.

So, you know, when it's done, what you actually wanna see some char.

Not black, but you wanna see charred pasta, which is very deeply red, because that means you have a lot of that extra flavor.

You're also gonna get that great texture as well.

A little pecorino or parmesan, if you like, on the top.

You know, this is so much better, well, relatively speaking, than just making a quick marinara and putting it on pasta.

It only takes about ten minutes or so.

That is so good.

You get pasta all over your face, but you get a little bit of the chili flakes.

It's got char, it's got depth of flavor.

It takes that tomato sauce down and really concentrates it.

And the texture is also great because the pasta has real tooth to it.

So the next time you want to do something a little crazy, you want to cook pasta like risotto, try pasta or spaghetti all'assassina, assassin's pasta.

Not hard to do, great result.

And it's something that you've probably never seen before.

♪ ♪ In the Campania region of Italy, chef Giuseppe Croce taught us how to make ragu cilentano.

This is a very old recipe.

It was actually a mainstay of the farmers who worked the farmlands for the nobility.

And they had two ingredients in abundance-- tomatoes and the little bits of meat that they felt like were unfit for their bosses.

So they would throw it all in a pot, let it cook all day and concentrate down, and that would be dinner.

So let's get started.

This is our version of that really concentrated sauce.

First, we're going to start with some olive oil, and then we have some onion, and we're gonna add some pancetta, which gives us a really nice smoky, porky flavor.

And we're gonna cook this down until the onions just start to brown.

That takes about four or five minutes.

When we were developing this recipe, we were trying to figure out what meats we actually wanted to use in this.

And we tried sausage, country pork ribs.

We tried pork butt, sirloin tips.

But really we ended up with the pancetta and short rib, which were the best combination, we thought, to give us that kind of deep, meaty flavor.

So these onions are just starting to brown.

It looks like they're ready.

So I'm gonna add tomato paste and I'm gonna brown that a little bit.

Tomato paste, obviously it's concentrated tomato, but it really does give you that cooked-down flavor when you use it in a sauce.

Actually thickens it a little bit too.

So it's a perfect thing for this.

Normally it would cook up to six hours.

We're doing it in half the time.

As you can see, it's starting to brown a little and stick to the bottom of the pot.

Then I'm going to deglaze our pan with a little bit of wine.

So that's another little bit of depth to this sauce.

So I'm just going to deglaze this, scraping up any bits at the bottom of the pan and then cook this down till it reduces by about half.

Now I'm going to add everything else.

We have our whole peeled tomatoes, a little bit of water, our short rib, and a half teaspoon each of salt and pepper.

And that's it.

Then all I'm gonna do is bring this to a simmer, we're gonna cover it and put it in a 350 degree oven.

And this will simmer slowly and cook really evenly for a couple of hours.

It's a lot easier than cooking it on the stove.

You kind of have to babysit that 'cause sometimes it starts to boil too much and you have to turn it down and you have to pay more attention.

But in the oven, it's perfect.

So this has been in the oven for two hours.

Take the lid off.

Oh, it's smells so good.

So I'm gonna stir it around and then I'm gonna put it back in the oven without the cover on.

This is something that we do a lot.

And what happens when you do that is it really reduces the sauce down even more.

But also you get a little bit of browning on the meat.

And it's a really nice way to kind of cook it down in a little bit of a shorter amount of time, but you get a lot of flavor when you do that.

So I'm gonna put this back in the oven for half an hour.

Okay, so you can see this is really reduced down.

You look, you can see some little charred bits on the meat.

I'm gonna let this sit for a minute because we want some of the oil to rise to the top so we can skim some of that off if we want.

And I'm gonna cook our pasta.

For this dish, we really liked a short kind of stubby pasta.

This is cavatelli, but you could use something like capellini or mezzi rigatoni.

So this is four quarts of water.

I'm gonna add a tablespoon of salt and our pound of cavatelli.

And we're gonna let that cook until it's al dente.

So while that's cooking, short rib can be kind of fatty, which is what makes it so delicious.

And you can take a minute and skim some of that fat off if you want.

How much you take off is up to you.

I do like to leave a little bit of it because there's a lot of flavor in that.

And let's stir this around.

So our pasta is done.

I'm actually gonna scoop it with this is called a spider.

It's a little easier than lifting up the whole pot, but if you wanna drain it, you can do that as well.

And then keep the pot on medium and stir it around until that sauce really coats all of our cavatelli.

Those bits of short rib are gonna break up a little bit.

It's so tender.

If you think it's a little bit dry, you can add a little bit of pasta water.

And then the last thing we wanna add is some nice fresh basil.

Basil and tomato, a classic combination.

And we're also gonna add some grated parmesan cheese.

So this really is a perfect Sunday sauce that you don't have to spend a lot of time babysitting it because it's all done in the oven.

But it is as rich as if you cooked it for six to eight hours.

Now let's try it.

♪ ♪ Let me add a little bit more parmesan cheese because I love it and it's so delicious on this.

Add a little drizzle of olive oil.

All right, let's try it.

♪ ♪ That meat is so tender.

And the sauce and pork, all of it is just so delicious together.

So this is our slow-cooked short rib ragu with pasta.

I love this sauce.

I have three adult sons and this is something I make all the time, and I think you will too.

You can get this and all the recipes from this season at MilkStreetTV.com ♪ ♪ - (speaking Italian): ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ - Recipes and episodes from this season of Milk Street are available at MilkStreetTV.com, along with shopping lists, printer-ready recipes, and step-by-step videos.

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