(found in old newspaper clipping)
(Hints from Heloise column)
I've just had one of the nicest Italian gentlemen cooks come into my home to show me how he could cook special spaghetti sauce in less than 45 minutes!
Here's how: He put the tomatoes, chopped onions, seasonings, etc. (everything you want in the sauce except the meat) , in my blender.
He let it run for one minute on high speed. This thoroughly mixed and homogenized all those ingredients into one little, thin stream. And don't get discouraged here, gals. It looks white and foamy but settles back to normal within 10 minutes of cooking.
One thing he did, which surprised me no end, was to add some bacon grease. (I learned that a little bacon grease really does something to this.)
If your are using meatballs, which he did, make them very, very small instead of the usual two-bite size. All he did was throw them on a foil-lined cookie sheet under the broiler, turning it on high heat.
You know what this did?
The broiler immediately seared the meat, keeping the juices in. And every time he stirred those teensy-weensy balls in the broiler, they got more beautiful. The reason for this is that the juice from the hamburger meat gets down on the foil-lined pan, and every time you stir them with a spoon, they get covered with more grease which seals in more of the flavor. He broiled the meatballs until they were golden brown on all sides. (One could do this on the top rack in their oven.)
After the spaghetti sauce had been cooking slowly for about 40 minutes, he dumped the piping hot, lusciously broiled, brown meat balls into the sauce along with part of the meat drippings, as he said that this would give the sauce that "long-hours-of-cooking taste".
After letting this simmer for about 5 minutes, he turned off the fire under the sauce, put a lid on the pot, and let the whole kaboodle stand about 10 minutes before serving. Just as he kept saying, "There is no use cooking something 6 or 8 hours is there? Taste this, Heloise..."
He was so right. His sauce was out of this world. And it was thick, too. So, instead of wasting six or eight hours cooking spaghetti sauce, why don't you little darlings who have a blender try putting everything (except the meat) in it, and make the sauce in 45 minutes, as he did?
I also learned that if you have no blender, you can use a food mill. And grate a potato (leaving the skin on) and a carrot into the sauce if you want it extremely thick. Besides, it stretches the sauce and adds vitamins. And if you add thin slices of green pepper to the sauce, it makes another out of this world sauce.
Our thanks to Angelo for this wonderful lesson.
Heloise
