Discover the simple beauty of this classic sauce. We taste three versions of it.
Tasting Italian Tomato Sauce
Introduction to Italian Tomato Sauce
This is the inaugural post for Mindful Eating 2 so I’m looking for a dish that is simple, classic, and familiar. Mindful Eathing2 need not be esoteric or out of the ordinary—it can be an integral part of everyday life and that is what I want to demonstrate with this first series of posts. Italian…
Know Your Ingredients
To taste and cook effectively it’s important to know your raw materials. Just as a sculptor must know the features of the stone she is working on, a good cook must know the flavor characteristics of basic ingredients in order to understand what cooking and adding flavor components will do. Raw tomatoes that you buy…
Tasting Three Sauces
For this project I use three tomato sauces: a classic marinara, a sugo di pomodoro which uses a soffritto, and a slow-cooked gravy popular in the U.S. These are recipes by well-known chefs and readily available on the Internet so I won’t copy them here. The idea for this project is to employ mindful eating…
Discoveries
So what did we discover in thinking about the aesthetics of tomato sauce? There is an aesthetic choice to be made when making a sauce. Are you going for freshness, preserving as much of the basic flavor of the raw ingredient as possible, or are you going for flavor development? The marinara sauce, because of…
Wine Pairing
If you look at pairing guides you will usually see a recommendation to serve Chianti with pasta and tomato sauce. The explanation for the pairing is that Chianti, as is true with most Italian wines, has good acidity and you need acidity to stand up to the acid in tomatoes. Low acid wines will taste…
Mindful Eating 2 