SEDUCED BY SUGO (download pdf)
Long-cooked Italian sauces captivate chefs and diners
Tara Duggan, Chronicle Staff Writer
Wednesday, February 21, 2007

In our collective culinary imagination, there is a mythical Italian grandmother perpetually simmering a pot of ragu.

This nonna rises early to visit the butcher. Then she heads back to the kitchen to saute the celery and onion in fat, brown the meat, add the wine or broth and, if she's from Bologna, the milk. By 10 or 11 a.m., the aromas have begun to build in her kitchen, escape through her window, out the balcony and down onto the street, where men chatting on a corner stop for a moment to inhale the fragrance. But the sauce won't be ready until dinnertime.

Called sugo, bolognese or ragu -- or, sometimes, gravy among Italian Americans -- Italy's long-simmering meat sauces are legendary. And while they may be a dying art among home cooks in Italy, they are in vogue with Bay Area chefs, who go so far as to include the number of hours of cooking time on their menus. These chefs realize that a rich, stewy meat sauce ladled atop buttery egg noodles satisfies a diner's innermost desires for the warm, reassuring dishes of nonna's kitchen, even if that diner never had a nonna.
But eating these dishes is not the only way to reap their benefits. Giving up part of the day to hole up in the house and simmer a sauce away helps slow down life's normally frenzied pace, and serving a bowl prepared with such love and patience is truly gratifying. And not all of these recipes necessarily take an entire day to cook.

There is a practical side to ragus as well, because they get better a day or two after cooking, making them ideal for dinner guests. They also freeze well for instant pasta meals during the week.

There is not an exact definition for any of these sauces. "Sugo" literally means "juice" in Italian, as well as sauce, and there are plenty of vegetable- and fish-based sugos as well as ones made with beef, pork, lamb, veal, duck or rabbit, with the possible addition of pancetta, sausage or organ meats.

The word "ragu" is derived from the French "ragout," but it refers to a meat sauce, not a stand-alone stew. It is mostly interchangeable with a meat sugo: a sauce of chopped vegetables and meat, either ground or in large pieces, sauteed in fat then slowly braised in liquid.

Staffan Terje and his staff make a couple of gallons of his Five-Hour Pork Sugo every day to serve over hand-cut tajarin pasta at Perbacco, a new Italian restaurant in San Francisco's Financial District.

"You'll see a sauce like this in some areas of Italy, where they call it a sugo, and in other areas they call it a ragu," he says. "It's pretty much the same. It can vary from town to town."

Sugo and ragu can both refer to a reduced sauce from which the pieces of meat have been removed -- hence the reference to juice, as in meat juices -- or a sauce with chunks of meat left in. To make the iconic ragu of Naples, cooks remove the large pieces of stewing meat from the sauce, then serve the sauce over pasta. The meat serves as a second course or a meal for another day.

Though the word "bolognese" also has become a generic term for meat sauce, it has a much stricter definition within Italy, where the quintessential ragu, or ragu alla bolognese, comes from Bologna and its surrounding region, Emilia-Romagna. But even there, recipes vary greatly. Most do not have much in the way of tomatoes -- usually only a little tomato paste or puree -- and include milk or cream.

Regional differences often come down to the availability of agricultural products. Northern Italy has more access to meat, while the less prosperous south relies more on vegetables. This partly explains why a Neapolitan ragu contains more tomatoes and less meat than a bolognese, says Chronicle contributor Joyce Goldstein, author of "Italian Slow and Savory" (Chronicle Books, 2004).

At Nopa restaurant in San Francisco, cook Liz Bills developed a recipe for Nine-Hour Bolognese as a way to use up high-quality scraps of meat, both cooked and raw. The restaurant serves the sauce over creamy polenta on Sundays.

"One day we may sell out of our beef entree, and the next day hardly sell any at all," she says. "So my solution to utilize most, if not all, of our meat products was to produce this dish and cut down on waste."

Lengthy process
Bills will use lamb, pork, beef and pancetta or all of the above in the sauce, and she recommends doing the same at home with whatever you have in the refrigerator, be it leftover pork chops or a little hamburger meat.

The reason the sauce takes so long to cook is that Bills first adds milk to the sauteed vegetables and meat, and allows it to evaporate very slowly, up to three hours. She then adds wine and repeats this lengthy evaporation process, before adding the tomatoes. At this point, she lowers the heat even more for an additional three hours of gentle simmering.

The grand total is more like 10 hours, if you include all the chopping and sauteing that goes on in the beginning. But home cooks making smaller batches will find it takes less time to evaporate the milk and wine than it does in Nopa's industrial-size pots.

Many cooks would actually argue that five or nine hours is overkill, and that 90 minutes to four or so hours is plenty of time to simmer a sauce, depending on the type of meat. Whatever your opinion, the long cooking is all about developing concentrated flavor and allowing the meat proteins to soften into a luscious texture.

"When I cook it fast, it's going to be dry," says chef Peter McNee of the meat sauces he makes at Poggio restaurant in Sausalito, which use rabbit, oxtail, wild boar and veal.

"I want the proteins to break down and the collagens to dissolve. The slower you cook it, the more you break down the protein and everything without parts being overdone and underdone."

Because the majority of meat sauces come from northern Italy, the traditional accompaniment is fresh egg-based pasta, though dried semolina pasta is often used in the south. Flat, wide noodles such as tagliatelle are most appropriate with a chunky ragu.

"Fettuccine or pappardelle will support the heavier sauces," Goldstein says. "No angel hair, no little delicate cutesy-pie noodles," she says.

Perbacco chef Terje says the choice of pasta also depends on the occasion.

"The flat pastas are a little bit more elegant, a little bit more refined," he says. "The dry pastas are a little bit more rustic."

If you plan to pull some sugo out of the freezer for an after-work dinner with salad, he suggests cooking short, dried pasta types, such as ziti or rigatoni, and simply tossing the sauce with the hot noodles. To be more elegant and serve the pasta as a central course at a dinner party, toss fresh pasta in butter and salt and pepper, and ladle the sauce on top, as he does for guests at Perbacco.

In the north, "because they're so proud of their egg pasta, you toss it at the table, whereas with the short pasta, you just toss it in," says Terje. "If I'm in a hurry, I'll toss it with rigatoni or penne and eat it traditional chef style, standing up."

A fading tradition
Though these long-cooked sauces seem to be in no danger of disappearing from restaurant menus, they are not being prepared in the home as often as they used to be, at least in northern Italy, says Renato Sardo, head of Slow Food International.

"The average family in northern Italy is very similar to what we have here," says Sardo, who recently relocated from Italy to Oakland with his American wife, Anya Fernald. "All the women are working. There is certainly less time and attention dedicated to food."

Sardo grew up in a small town in Piedmont, Italy, where he, his two brothers, mother and father ate a hot lunch and dinner together every day and women were definitely the cooks in the family. His mother, who worked as a teacher, usually only had time to make quick dishes like pasta carbonara. She set aside the preparation of labor-intensive foods like lasagna for holiday celebrations.

"There was a distinct difference between what I had from my grandmother and from my mother," he says. "My grandmother had more time, so she cooked very elaborate meals. Every day almost. But she never worked."

Sardo says that because the lifestyle in southern Italy is more traditional than in the north, you still see more complex food preparation in homes there. Elsewhere, the grandmotherly art of home cooking looked like it could be in danger of extinction, at least until recently.

"About 10 years ago, it was considered not cool to spend time in the kitchen. The modern life was outside," says Sardo, 37. "But now things are changing. I know some people a little younger than me that are very into cooking."

Still, Sardo notices more interest in cooking among American Slow Food members than Italian members. "The Italians still rely on the skills of the parents," he says.

American cooks may be drawn to time-consuming activities like the preparation of a ragu partly because, unlike Italians, many of us grew up with parents who did not know how to cook.

Speeding up the process
But it may not be necessary to spend a whole day in the kitchen in a quest to re-create Grandma's ethereal, long-lost ragu. Doing so is probably not even based on reality, says Goldstein, who associates the fantasy of the forever-simmering sauce, or gravy, as it's called among Italian Americans, with New York immigrant life.

"This is where this myth of cooking the sauce, or the gravy, for three days comes from," she says. "It is an American thing."

Not everyone thinks the sauce should cook that long, anyway.

"A meat will have given out its juices after too much cooking," says Goldstein. "After 3, 3 1/2 hours, that's about how far it's going to go."