Sunday sauce is great use of a Dutch oven
Michelle Doll is a Brooklyn-based chef, food writer and culinary teacher. She’s known in the New York area for her elegant cakes and her company Michelle Doll Makes. She says she has been accumulating kitchen tools and hacks for most of her life, and she shares her know-how in a new cookbook, “Essential Tools, Tips & Techniques for the Home Cook.”
The book is organized around those tools and techniques. There are “tool” chapters on pressure cookers, blenders, sheet pans and Dutch ovens, and technique chapters on sauteeing and roasting. Each chapter gives pointers on the topic and then follows with recipes that demonstrate her lessons.
This Sunday Sauce is from the chapter on Dutch ovens. It’s great over pasta; Doll says it also makes a killer sauce for lasagna and “freezes like a dream.”
THE SUNDAY SAUCE (BOLOGNESE SAUCE,
AKA RAGU)
1 cup dry wine (either red or white)
1 1/2 cups crushed tomatoes, ideally San Marzano
1 pound pasta
Add the oil and butter to your Dutch oven and heat over medium heat. Add the onion and cook while stirring until it becomes translucent, about 5 minutes.
Add the celery and carrot, cooking for an additional 2 minutes until they are all coated with oil and beginning to soften.
Add the ground meat to the vegetables with a large pinch of salt and a few cranks of pepper. Allow the meat to cook for at least a minute before breaking it up with a wooden spoon and continuing to cook until all the meat is brown. Pour in the milk and grated nutmeg and simmer until it appears dry, about 5 minutes.
Add the wine (it really doesn’t matter if it’s red or white, I promise. Just make sure it’s not sweet) and let it simmer until it too has evaporated. Add the tomatoes to the pot—careful, they splatter—and thoroughly stir to combine. When the sauce begins to bubble, lower the heat to a slow simmer and cook uncovered for 1 to 3 hours. It’s delicious at 1 hour but even more decadent after 3.
If the sauce begins to look too dry or sticks to the bottom of the pan, add 1/4 cup of water and stir to combine as necessary. Skim any pools of fat from the surface with a spoon or ladle and discard.
Serve with a hearty homemade pasta like pappardelle or a box of rigatoni.