Tomato | Sybaritica

In Part 1 of our Sunday Gravy Experiment, I introduced you to the basic plan of creating a rich tomato sauce that will, over time, be fortified and enriched by having various meats and vegetables cooked in it for a  series of different meals. In Part 2 of the series,  I made a rich stock using pork hocks and beef bones and this will form the beginnings of the gravy itself. If you wish to follow along with the process but don’t really want to bother with making your own stock, you can always substitute a commercial chicken broth, but I think you will find the homemade really improves the final product.

In either event, it is now time to move on to making the actual tomato sauce… Read more

A plain tomato sauce can contain little more than tomatoes with some simple seasonings but other, more complex, varieties will include garlic, onions and other vegetables somewhere in the cooking process. Likewise, a truly rich tomato sauce, particularly those destined to be a ‘Sunday gravy’ will frequently be ‘beefed up’ (if you will pardon the expression) with stocks based on chicken or other meats.

For my experimental project to create a Sunday gravy that can be built upon and enhanced over the long term (please see yesterday’s Introductory Post), I am going to first make a rich meat stock using beef and pork hocks so that the collagen and other proteins released by the skin and bone will work with the meaty flavors to give a good, hearty body to our final sauce… Read more

“Hey, come over here, kid, learn something. You never know, you might have to cook for 20 guys someday… You see, you start out with a little bit of oil. Then you fry some garlic. Then you throw in some tomatoes, tomato paste, you fry it, you make sure it doesn’t stick. You get it to a boil, you shove in all your sausage and your meatballs… And a little bit of wine. And a little bit of sugar, and that’s my trick.”

Who can forget that terrific scene in ‘The Godfather’ when Fat Clemenza shares his special sauce recipe with Michael Corleone? Old Clemenza never uses the term but what he is basically cooking is one of the countless variations on the tomato based sauce that generations of Italian-Americans have come to call  gravy, or, more particularly, ‘Sunday Gravy’… Read more

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You won’t often come across tomatoes stir fried with eggs on a lot of Chinese restaurant menus (at least in the west) but this dish, in various permutations, is actually extremely popular in China. Indeed, it is one of the most common dishes on the menu in factories and schools across the Chinese Republic and many Chinese say that it is the first dish they ever learned to cook. It is, I suppose, something of a comfort food in that nation and it seems to be popular at any time of the day. Read more