Ragu: the Porcini Strike Back

As I mentioned, we came into a serious wealth of porcinis recently (and a duck).  While the first night of porcini called for a simple saute with pasta, the need to end a large number of mushrooms on a Sunday lead inevitably to ragu.  Now, when we got here, I really didn't get what the big deal about ragu was.  I mean, everyone gets excited about it, smacks their lips with relish, cooks for hours and you get a basic red sauce with some meat in it?  Its like, midwest housewife cooking from the 1950's with better PR.  Which touches on a couple of points:  First, the best cooking for Italians is categorically that which one's grandmother either did or might have done.  The food here?  Good.  Inventive?  Since the war, not so much.  Second point?  I might be dismissing 1950's housewives (or at least Italian grandmothers) a bit to quickly.  (but I don't know, wasn't there, might not visit even if I could).  Turns out that the whole ragu thing -- take good but not super interesting ingredients, cook for a very long time -- actually produces.  Because Lauren has been itching to make chocolate pasta inspired by no recipes) for weeks we had the ragu over chocolate pici.  With a seared duck breast and some sauteed broccoli rabe.



Ragu:
Make your sofrito with a diced onion, some garlic, celery sauteed in olive oil (classically it should also have carrots and parsley, but we didn't have any).  Add ground pork (almost any ground red meat, or mixture there of, works here) we used 200 grams, or about a 1/3 of a pound, then diced porcinis, a can of tomatoes and a bit of red wine.  Cook forever, or at least 2 hours, adding more wine (or water) when the mixture starts to get too dry.  Next time I do this I'll probably save out the mushrooms until about an hour before mealtime to preserve more of the porcini aroma.  Longer cooking times in general equal more intense flavors.  Started this one around lunch, turned it off for a couple of hours in the middle of the afternoon and then let it cook for a few more before dinner, which makes it easier to give the ragu the insanely long cooking time it really wants.  Salt and pepper to taste.

Chocolate Pici:  Pici is an eggless hand formed pasta from around Siena which we've made a lot of, though less since we got a pasta maker.  Make it just like you would regularly with the addition of ~2 Tbs. bitter chocolate powder.  The color ends up being quite intense, but the flavor was rather more subtle (but still present).  In spite of looking a bit like something you might find at the Klingon mess hall, this worked really well with the porcini ragu.

Duck Breast:  This time I cut the skin in squares, just like you're suposed to, sprinkled it with a bit of salt and pepper, pan seared it on both sides and poured a bit of 18 year old balsamic (this is actually the quick fix stuff which they take all kinds of shortcuts on (boiling the must) to imitate the 30 year old balsamic) over it.  Then deglaze the pan with a bit of red wine and make like an abstract expressionist.

Broccoli Rabe:  Went with what has become our more or less standard approach, that is, saute some garlic and broccoli rabe then toss in a bit of red wine vinegar.  Glory in the pepperyness of the broccoli rabe.

We had this with a 2003 "Chiusa di Pannone" Sagrantino di Montefalco DOCG, which may well be one of the best wines I've had since we got here over a year ago.  Sagrantino is a grape grown (to the best of my knowledge, it's possible there's someone growing it in some random corner of California) only in Umbria.  In Montefalco they make two styles of 100% Sagrantino, both of which (to add to the confusion) are labled Sagrantino di Montefalco DOCG.  A passito (dried grape desert wine) which they have been making more or less forever, and a dry, intensely tannic wine they started making sometime in the mid-sixties, which today has the reputation of being one of the great unknown wines of Italy, fully equal to Barolo or Brunello but without the hype.  Very young (this grower used to hold their wines for 10 years but have dropped down to 5) but also intense, complex and elegant.  The sheer amount of ragu smells in the air made getting an exact read on the flavors difficult, but the general trend was dried black fruits, leather and black pepper.