The back yard needs a day's work on it to prepare for winter. I've been slowly cleaning out the basement for a few weeks and it really needs to get done. There is clutter in every area of the house. There is the week's laundry to do.

So instead of dealing with any of those important concerns I decided to embark on a project to make the greatest lasagna I (and perhaps anyone) have ever eaten.

Step 1 - The (24h) Rag� To End All Rag�s

For this meat sauce I will procure the best possible meats and grind them myself. So my first task is to drive across town to one of the better butchers in the city. The meat is all local organic-type stuff. Their main clientele is rich people looking for fancy expensive cuts of standard meats. The counter staff are accustomed to dealing with such.

So my request for three pounds of chuck and 1.5 pounds of pork shoulder was met with a puzzled look. She went to get a butcher who seemed pleased to talk meat with someone. I asked for some suet as well, which he shaved right off a nice aged piece of beef they had in the fridge.

Next I need to get a meat grinder. I stop at a kitchen supply store and get the grinder attachment for a KitchenAid mixer. I also pick up a new food mill, since my old one was cheap and is prone to rust.

At home I am excited to get going, so I wash the new grinder and set it up man-style (you'll see what I mean in a minute). I trim the beef and pork of all the fat and tendons and cube what's left, along with the suet to add some good fat back in. I put some in the grinder and turn it on. Nothing comes out except for a little squishy meat puree. Yuck.

I figure I had used too small a grinding face, so I pull apart the now-gummy grinder and try again with the larger gauge face, but the same thing happens.

In desperation, and as a last resort, I read the directions to the grinder to see what's going wrong. I had forgotten to put in the little blade that actually cuts the meat before forcing it through the grinder holes. So I put it all back together properly and this time the grinding goes well. I put it all through twice to end up with a beautiful big pile of fresh ground chuck, shoulder, and suet.

I'm making a pretty big batch of rag� (about 15 cups), so I have some dicing to do, of two onions, three big carrots, and three celery stalks to end up with about 3 cups. The onions go first in some oil and butter in a big skillet, followed by the other vegetables for a little bit. Then I take it all out and brown the meat with plenty of salt to bring out the juices. The process is much quicker and smells much nicer than with store-bought ground meats.

By the time all this has taken place I actually have to pause what I'm doing to make dinner. After dinner it all goes into a big enameled iron pot, to which I add about three cups of whole milk and set it to simmer off the milk for about an hour (put the kids to bed). Then I put in about two cups of white wine and set it to simmer for another hour (watch Desperate Housewives with the lovely Mrs. Zorn). Finally, about four cups worth of San Marzano tomatoes go through the food mill and into the sauce.

At this point it is 10:15, and normally it would simmer for a few hours. But you'd have to check it every once in a while to make sure it doesn't dry out, stick, and burn. So instead I set the over to 215 F (around boiling point) and put the whole thing in the over to simmer overnight.

This morning the whole house smelled of the sauce, which is was a nice smell but a little odd to wake up to. I checked the sauce and it looked fantastic. The ingredients had practically melted together. I think the quality meat has made a big difference. I put the oven down to 170 F and will let it simmer throughout the day.

We'll give the sauce a test run tonight over some penne or something.

This weekend, rather than doing chores which will now be even more desperate, I will instead make the spinach pasta and assemble the Lasagna Heard 'Round The World.

The other possibility is that something went wrong with the rag� and I will discard it all in a fit of rage and become despondent for the rest of the week.

You had me all the way up to the point where you said you were going to use spinach pasta in the recipe.

I'm going old school for this one.

There is only a tablespoon of finely chopped spinach in with a few cups of flour and a few eggs. Its biggest contribution is colour. I don't taste that much of a difference.

Depending on how homogeneous you want your grind, you may want to consider placing your cubed meat in the freezer for 30 minutes before grinding. This helps the product stay stiff as it goes through the die, and lets the mix be a bit more "even" between meat and fat (versus pate-like, which will have a gritty texture when cooked).

Also, consider dropping an ice cube in every 3 to 4 minutes of grinding. The blade can heat up significantly and cause fat smearing (meaning more fat is left on the walls of the grinder than mixed in with your meat).

For home-ground meat, especially for a ragu, I'd use a mix of chuck and brisket for the beef component, and shoulder for the pork. One item to remember is that Italian beef tends to be much, much heavier in the "iron" flavor (some call it liver); you can fool a Bolognese snob with a little bit of liver mixed in with your grind. If you can, some quality leaf lard mixed in with the beef fat will compliment the ground meat flavor nicely and create a more "complete" flavor package.

Cheers,

-Andrew

I was about to suggest adding a handful of liver. Concur with the rest of
your post, except I'd use all chuck.

As it happened, I put everything in the freezer during the time it took me to determine what I had initially done wrong and cleaned everything up.

It is very difficult to find leaf fat where I am, so I think getting some would involve asking for it specifically and waiting for it to arrive (if at all). I had household chores that need procrastinating immediately, so that wasn't an option.

Thank you for the tips. I will consider them for next time.

I'm anxious to find out how this turned out. Please do post the results.

I'd be concerned that my meat, no matter how good a quality, will have the texture of rice pudding after going twice through the grinder, browned, and simmered for more than 24 hours.

Beef, tomatoes, onions, carrots, celery, and salt so far. What spices will you use? What cheeses?

I'm not a big fan of significant texture in a sauce like this. The sauce I'm making is specifically for use with tagliatelle or in baked pasta dishes like lasagne and cannelloni, so it's exactly what I'm looking for - something to coat the pasta.

There is pork shoulder in there too.

I used a tiny bit of nutmeg but forgot to mention it. There are no other spices that make sense to my palette for a sauce like this.

The only cheese used in the lasagne itself will be parmigiano reggiano.

I have obviously touched on religious issues with respect to meat sauces and lasagna! I should point out that I am attempting make a strictly classical Emilia-Romagna style lasagna.

If it is a fine grind, and browned appropriately, it will not have a rice pudding texture... but then again, in a good lasagne, the meat should permate the sauce and not imply much texture. The cheese and pasta are the texture, IMO.

Great call on the nutmeg by the way. Love just a hint of it... also, some finely diced fennel in with the mirepoix can really light things up, but tread lightly: it can quickly go from "oooh!" to "uuuuck". And if you are doing your ragu from a Bolognese perspective, you can also add some cream and sherry to the ragu when you first add the meat. Yum.

Cheers,

-Andrew

did i miss how you made the pasta??

for a killer(check cholesterol count) make egg yoke pasta. 2 cups of durum flower, and about 13 egg yokes. bit of salt.

I tried the sauce on some penne last night.

I hadn't added enough salt. I normally make 3-6 cup batches, and this one was 16 cups. It's hard to add 5 times as much salt to a dish than you are used to. That's fixed now.

I probably used too much fat when I ground the meat. But it was easy enough to adjust.

Simmering the sauce in the oven does not evaporate enough of the liquid, so some more stovetop cooking will be required any time I use part of this batch of sauce.

But the flavour was fantastic, which is the most important thing. Everything else can be fixed.

An old work assistant once gave me a bit of advice on making lasagna. Add 2 pinches of cinnamon to the sauce. Try it...but no more than 2 pinches.

Zorn you've inspired me, just got back from the grocery store.
Thanks everyone else gonna try a few of the hints mentioned above in my recipe. Don't generally experiment with my memory but gonna try a few of the tricks.
I would also suggest making a bechamel sauce for you Lag. tried it last time I made it and it was fairly successful according to feedback, and of course my personal opinion as well. Going to try adding some Ricotta cheese into the bechamel this time to see how that works out, as some of my eating party seem intent on their being ricotta in it this time around.
Keep the updates coming looking forward to how this will turn out for you and good eating.

Any idea what your fat ratio was? I would aim for 75/25 and prepare the mirepoix in the fat. Anything greater than 80/20 is a sin punishable by 1 year of overcooked tortellini.

Cheers,

-Andrew

That is indeed an essential component of the traditional lasagna I will execute on the weekend.

The rest is actually a breeze, albeit time-consuming. I have a pretty good hand with making pasta now and the rest is just repeating the same steps over and over again.

One thing I noticed this week at the store is the incredible increase in cost of some things. I normally don't look at the prices of the things I get all the time, but I noticed good dried pasta is about 2x what it usually was, and Parmiggiano-Reggiano is about 60% more.