Italian food recipes - 4

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Are you ready for this Christmas edition?

Today I want to introduce a meat sauce typical from my hometown Genova: o sugo ao tocco (sauce with whole piece of meat).

It's traditionally made for Christmas as it features winter ingredients and it's very rich, it usually goes with Genoese ravioli, but you can have it also with pappardelle, fettuccine or tagliolini.

Here is my tocco at the end of the cooking:

Recipe:

Choose a strong cut of beef with some fat and some connective tissue, I usually go for the neck. Choose a size that can easily fit your pot.

You will also need carrots, onions and celery for the sautéed; dry porcini mushrooms; fresh pine nuts; tomato sauce; extra virgin olive oil; red wine; a few leafs of laurel and some rosemary.

Let the mushrooms to rehydrate in a cup with some warm water.

Chopop the vegetables for the sautéed, heat some oil and let them fry until you see they are done, take the sautéed out of the pot and dry it to be sure there's no water left.

Heat some more oil in the the pot where you cooked the sautéed and put the meat to almost get burned on each side, you should see that the bottom of the pot start caramelizing, so do not use a non-stick one. When the meat is well coloured on every side use the wine to deglaze the pot, add the sautéed (of you like you can blend it into a cream before getting it back in the pot.

Add the tomato sauce, the filtered water from the mushrooms and the chopped mushrooms, the pine nuts, the chopped rosemary and some leafs of laurel, a pinch of salt.

Heat it up until boiling and leave it gently boiling for at least 3/4 hours, mixing it every now and then.

When it's almost ready check it and adjust with salt if necessary. At the end the sauce should be very thick, brownish, and with lots of fat drops on top, the meat should be super soft and should get smashed if you stick it not super gently, so be careful while mixing.

You can choose weather to use the sauce to season pasta and then have the meat as separate course or to chop the meat and leave it in the sauce and make it even richer.

Let me know if you'll try it for need Christmas or for the New Year's Eve ❤️

@penny @missy @lemon

VIEW 15 of 15 COMMENTS
ferkixlll:
Just chop the vegetables or mince as a Sofrito? Similar to what is my family's meat sauce: my father's parents came over ( as infants ) at the turn of the 20th cent., his mother's people came from Naples. Eat well 🙂🍷🍷.
brunhild:
@ferkixlll in Naples there's a traditional recipe of a meat sauce called "Genovese" which is very similar to the Genoese Sugo Au Tuccu. I think that, as the name suggests, Naples people learnt the technique from people from Genoa and then changed it a bit: in the Genovese you should use different cuts of meat (beef and pork) and some sausages, in the Tuccu you shall use only one piece of beef.

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