Spaghetti Bolognese
Frank
2,372 Posts
WTF!!!!!I just ordered a plate of Spaghetti Bolognese from this Italian restaurant around the corner and what do I get?Penne with a weird tasting tomato and cream sauce with sausage crumbs.I call the place and they tell me: "yeah, we made it Penne because we were out of Spaghetti, it's both Pasta"I'm almost speachless at this point and but mannage to ask what the damn that "sauce" was supposed to be and he says "that's the way we do it, that's our sauce bolognese".I explain to him that that's an outrage but he wdoesn't seem to understand...He even had an Italian accent.What the hell is going on here? I mean NYC is famous for its good food but what went wrong with the Italian community here? Every Italian neighborhood restaurant I tried so far was average at best and on a sunny day and downright ridiculously poor on many and not all that rare occasions.You try serving shit like this as Spaghetti Bolognese somewhere in the civilised world and you're most likely to end up with the damn plate in your face and rightfully so. Were the Italian immigrants who made it to NY expelled from their home country for the barbaric ways in which they treat their food?Now I checked online and there are english language recipies that claim a Sauce Bolognese is prepared by crumbling sausage meat into a tomato sauce... goddamn!Simple dishes like these are the backbone of every culture. Dishes that if prepared the right way take an enormous amount of work and time but use relatively cheap ingrediences. How can one allow to let people falsify such cornerstones of culinary culture as the Sauce Bolognese into some shit that's thrown together in 5 minutes?Lord have mercy on our souls!
Comments
Spaghetti alla Bolognese, Spaghetti Bolognese, or Spaghetti Bolognaise in a form popular outside of Italy, consists of a meat sauce served on a bed of spaghetti with a good sprinkling of grated Parmigiano cheese. Although Spaghetti alla Bolognese are very popular outside of Italy, it never existed in Bologna, where rag?? is served always with the local egg pastas tagliatelle or lasagne. Spaghetti is a durum wheat pasta from Naples, and the Naples Rag?? of a meat flavoured thick tomato sauce clings much better to slippery spaghetti than Bologna's ground beef rag??.
In recent decades, the dish has become very popular in Sweden and Denmark as spagetti och k??ttf??rss??s, in Swedish, and spaghetti og k??dsovs in Danish, especially among children. It is also popular in the United Kingdom (where it is colloquially abbreviated to spag bol or spag bog) and has become a staple of the British dinner table. In the United States as well, the term 'bolognese' is often applied to a tomato-and-ground-beef sauce that bears little resemblance to rag?? served in Bologna.
Chinese people often use the term "Western zhajiang mian" to refer to spaghetti bolognese, alluding to its superficial similarities with the traditional Chinese noodle dish of zhajiang mian as both are dry noodles covered with a thick rag?? mainly made of minced meat. This provides a symmetrical perspective to Westerners referring to zhajiang mian as "Chinese spaghetti".
That's true but if you'd told me before that I'd ever hear any Italian tell me "Penne, Spaghetti, doesn't matter, it's all pasta" I wouldn't have believed you. Not in a million years.
That's what I'm making tonight!
Arthur Ave.
Spaghetti Marinara isnt required to come w/ seafood unless u specify.
Marinara is just a style of sauce. Spaghetti is Pasta. Simple.
I get where you are coming from, really I do. But dude, must we remind you that planes leave from NYC back to the "civilised world" every 15 minutes?
*And yes, my Italian grandmother arrived at Ellis Island back in the 30's along with her brother, as basically orphans who were cast out from their home country because of the barbaric ways that Italians treat their own children once their mama dies sick and papa decides to remarry.*
Point being, watch your far-reaching words over your frickin spaghetti-o's not actually being o's.
But yeah, weak Italian food is mad weak.
Here, marinara is seafood sauce. We call that basic sauce napolitana......well at least that's the case with most italian joints here.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/17/magazine/17food-t.html
My wife worked on this shoot for a NYTimes Bolognese recipe, and we tried it.... Oh my f??ck, it's like if the Greek Goddess Demeter were Italian and her breast milk contained wine and beef and she let every hungry soul suckle at her teat til their heart's content. So delicious.
I made it last week for a big birthday party we hosted, with a side of ricotta, mushroom, green onion crostini and a salad with pear and gorgonzola.
The sauce took 4 hours, and while I was cooking peolpe would venture into the kitchen, watch me dump an entire stick of butter into the pan, say, "Damn!" and leave. They'd wander back in and see 2 cups of wine go in, say, "Shit, dude!" and leave. After simmering for hours everyone was about to rush the kitchen, the whole house smelled like heaven. I'm pretty sure everyone wanted to f??ck my stirring spoon after they ate. Nobody even finished their sides, it was all seconds and thirds of that dish. So good.
Healthy? probably not so much...
WIKI-
Marinara Sauce (Italian salsa marinara or salsa alla marinara) originated in Naples after the Spaniards had introduced the tomato from the New World. The word marinara is derived from marinaro, which is Italian for ???of the sea.???
Italy and the Mediterranean-
Marinara sauce in Italy and some other Mediterranean countries is commonly used with various pasta dishes including spaghetti, penne and fusilli. The base for the sauce is made from olive oil, ripe tomatoes, garlic and herbs, together with other seafood ingredients. These may include vongole (clams), mussels, and prawns.
America-
The Italian American version of this sauce is made from olive oil, ripe tomatoes, garlic and herbs. Considered a little spicy compared to tomato sauce, this red sauce is easily prepared and marries well with any pasta dish. It is also commonly served alongside foods such as mozzarella sticks, chicken, calzones and seafood.
Contrary to the Italian version, marinara sauce in America does not include any type of fish or seafood. Many people over the years have altered marinara sauce recipes, adding in their own spices such as oregano, black pepper, basil, parsley and chili pepper.
prepare to wait for a table...
if you're making it at home, prease use canned tomatoes (san marzanao preferably), especially in the dead of winter. Tomatoes in N. America generally suck a big one.
Finally, please for goodness sakes, take it easy on the sauce. It's called pasta after all, not chili.
Wowzer!! I was ready to be sonned and have my rent raised!!
But American canned tomatoes are packed in their natural juices vs. oversea tomates whick are packed in puree w/ is cooked down tomatoes.
The word "marinara" comes from the root
word "mare" which is "sea" in Italian.
frutti di mare = seafood
I have a can in the cupboard waiting to be turned into trippa alla fiorentina.
Dang, I'm sorry you had such a bummer experience. It reminds me of one time I ordered Chow Mein in a cafeteria and was served a plate of stir fried beef and celery on a bed of steamed rice, not a noodle to be seen.
And Bam, thanks for the nyt Bolognese recommendation, those photos are pure food styling pr0n. I have a couple of foodstrut blogg poasts I'm cooking up, I need to get my photos in order.
PS--In general, no sauce worth eating takes less than four hours to cook.
Ive experimented w/ both styles of canned joints and i now use a combo of both.
Or you could cop some real tomatoes and crush the shit yourself.
Trippa was one thing I could never get down with. My dad ate it all
the time. I think just knowing what it was ruined it for me.
God help you if you ever try to find Mexican food there.
I'm going to go with Bambouche - looks like he's cooking Med style, and frankly any cooking that looks at black pepper as a spice you may-or-may-not add gets the gass face. More garlic though!
That's the real deal right there. My point is you're not going to get a sauce like that at some corner pizza place. It's like ordering crab cakes from a diner.
LOL @ San Marzano tomatoes popping up everywhere:
They hardly exist and the yearly production is, unfortunately, very limited. Almost all the cans labeled as San Marzano maybe include decent or even delicious tomatoes but not OG San Marzanos.
"The original indeterminate San Marzano varieties were sensitive to many diseases, and the arrival of the cucumber mosaic virus in the Naples region in the 1970s effectively destroyed what was left of a fragile market. Nowadays, the pseudo San Marzano tomatoes that one can find come from hybrid varieties that have inferior taste characteristics but which are resistant to many of the common diseases."
source: http://www.eu-sol.net/public/biodiversity/tomatoes/san-marzano
Thank you for restoring my belief in mankind!
That recipe is pretty much how I learned it from an Italian girlfriend I had some 25 years ago and whose father was a chef. Only difference being the usage of milk and butter. We would only use olive oil for cooking and add a spoonful of butter on top of the sauce before serving. The main important thing is the browning process, "crud and scrape" as they put it in the NY Times recipe, very true. I normally use one third each of ground beef, pork and beef cut in sugarcube sized chunks. As it was explained to me, the original point of the Ragu or Sauce Bolognese was to use up meat scraps of lower quality and cook them long enough in acidic tomatoes and olive oil to make them chewable. Oxtail also works fine and the bones give some extra flavor.
In an ideal world any small neighborhood Italian restaurant that offers Bolognese should prepare it the "right way" but of course you can't expect that to be true. Sometimes when I need a quick fix and don't feel like standing in the kitchen for half a day I take my chances and try it elsewhere with usually low expectations but damn... that crap last night was by far the worst I've ever got.
I don't know too much about Mexican food except that I really, really love it. There is a restaurant around the corner from our place called "Nuevo Mexico" and it's amazing in my book. But as I said, I don't know too much about Mexican food and have never been to Mexico.
I'll co-sign Al di La as the best Italian in Park Slope.