"Anthony's Sauce Talk, Italian Recipe Discussions" Copyright © 1998-2008 All rights reserved



Sauce Talk Continued...
Email discussions about Italian recipes. Answers to many questions can be found within these discussions...
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Anthony,
Tonight I will attempt your spaghetti recipe for my friends. I totally love the way you explain everything and I just wanted to say THANK YOU for spelling it all out so that even I (culinary challenged) can follow. I'm really looking forward to following your instructions while I'm drinking a glass of red wine with Italian music in the background. It will bring back those very fond grandma memories.

CIAO ~ Valerie

Valerie,
Have Fun!!!!! Feel free to take some pic's and send 'em over and I'll throw them up on the site :-). The recipe is a lot of work but trust me, you'll be rewarded for the effort. Let me know how it all comes out.

~8-) Anthony

Hello Anthony,
Great success! I started cooking the sauce on Wednesday night for my dinner on Thursday. It was really fun following your directions step by step. So much more fun than following a regular recipe! Last night everyone was so impressed that I could actually cook a real meal. Usually I order pizza or Chinese take out. For my dinner last night I had it all - Italian background music, Chianti, big checkered napkins stuck in our shirts. I had the fireplace going (it's still cold here in the Great Lakes State of Michigan). The house smelled so good from the cooking. It was really great. I made my husband responsible for the garlic bread. At first he was kind of whining that your recipe was alot of work. I said to him follow those instructions word for word and don't miss a step. It was worth it - he agreed! My girlfriends were reading your instructions, they were just laughing at all your special comments. After we drank all the Chianti we stuck candles in the bottles and they dripped all down the sides of the bottles - just like the good old days! It was PERFECT. The only thing missing was the camera. I will cook it all again soon and I will send pictures then.

Thank you so much!

~ Valeriei

 Valerie,
So glad you had fun with it. Yup, lot's O work for sure to make the entire recipe but oh so rewarding :-) No pain no gain. Glad to see your husband persevered and followed those instructions. Candles in the bottles with the wax dripping down and a fire? Yup, PERFECT!!!! To bad no camera, I look forward to future pics :-)

Happy cooking, EnJoY life, Make friends and EAT GOOD!!!!
Ciao,
~8-) Anthony

Hi Anthony,
Could you give me some advice for my wife? She always insists on making a bolognase sauce by starting with onions/garlic as you'd expect, but by frying or more like boiling the ingredients in a small quantity of water instead of olive oil. She then adds the minced beef to the onions that was lightly boiled in the water. She is worried about the fat content and so avoids using oil. I think the oil is important to get the meat cooking at a higher temperature, which reduces fat from the meat/mince and evaporates some of it perhaps. I could be wrong but perhaps you can explain better. Can you say why olive oil is used rather than just water so I can pass this on to my wife then?? Odd question I know, but the books don't really explain this and your experience might help more. ..Many Thanks,

 ~ Brian,

Brian,
Well there is no question cooking with the oil adds fat. But that is where the taste is. When you start with an olive oil base that flavor stays in the sauce and cooks throughout the whole process and frying the meatballs and braciole also adds much more flavor to the sauce as well. When you boil with water their is no added taste. Sure water has not fat but it also has no flavor. Does she drain out the water real well and then put the meat in the sauce? If so she is pouring out a whole bunch of flavor with the water. Just my 2 cents. Don't get me in trouble with your wife ;-)

Ciao,

~8-) Anthony

P.S. Really good Italian food "cannot" be fat-free. It's just not possible..

Anthony,
My name is Ron Miller. I live in a little town in Southern Alberta called Lethbridge. I have been a great lover of Italian cuisine for as long as I can remember (My Father served with the Seaforth Highlanders in WWII and came up with the Canadian 8th Army through Sicily and Italy. He came away with a great love for the people, the country and the food. He passed that on the his children.) Although I have made feeble attempts at preparing Italian dishes, I have never come to understand the secrets of the lore. As you can gather from my last name, there aren't many Italian Mama's or Grandma's in my family to learn from. The purpose for my e-mail is to thank you for taking the time to share some of these "secrets" with those of us who don't know. I have prepared your wonderful recipe and it was amazing. The instructions were so thorough I felt like you were right beside me. Thank you for coming to my kitchen and helping me out. Please pass along my gratitude to your Mama & Grandma assuming they are still with you. If not, I'm sure they hear your prayers.

~ Ron

P.S. If you have any other recipes, I would love to hear about them. Thanks again.

Ron,
Nice to hear from you. It's always nice to hear from someone who took the time to work their way through the recipe and are able to enjoy the creation they made. Glad you like the sauce. It really is a lot better when you make it yourself. Here is a short little story about how that recipe made it's way onto the net My Grandma made a wonderful sauce!! (pretty much what you made), and my Mom made the same stuff..and My mother in-law is quite Italian as well and her sauce was very similar... and I watch them all closely and asked a LOT of questions because I liked their sauce so much. So the sauce is really a culmination of two moms and 1 grandma, WoW! A great combination! Well as the years rolled on my Mom and Dad got divorced and my Dad really missed his Mother-In-laws spaghetti sauce. Auh, but I new how to make, but had never took the time to write it all down (most Italian cooks don't write this stuff down, it's just all in the head and the taste buds). So, one day as a favor for my Dad I decided to painstakingly write down every minute detail in a step by step fashion that anybody could follow (you see my Dad is not a chef by a long shot). So I worked it all up and threw it up on the net for my Dad, gave him the address to the page and it worked! He could now make his mother in-laws spaghetti sauce all by himself! :) Well, I did not think about the page to much after that but then noticed that a LOT of people where starting to visit this page and I started receiving lots of friendly email about how happy they where that they could finally make a nice homemade spaghetti sauce like their grandma used to make etc, etc,... It really is almost a lost art. So I have had a lot of fun conversing with people about their childhood and how they used to have this wonderful spaghetti sauce that was always a mystery how grandma use to make it taste so great!!! Yes! I do plan to add many more recipes when I find the time to write it all down. They will all be in the easy to understand step by step recipe format as what's on the site now :) I find people really like this kind of recipe, easy to follow with helpful hints along the way. The next recipes I will be putting up on the site will be "Lasagna", "Eggplant Parmesan", and "Manicotti" and more to come.. :) Thanks again for taking the time to write and let me know that the recipe turned out well for you.

Enjoy Life!!!

 ~8-) Anthony


Anthony,
First of all- Great website! I especially love the photos you added to help in the preparation. The reason why I am writing is that I plan to attempt your sauce recipe this weekend for family. I am anxious to get started! Anyway, I wanted to ask you if there is any room in the recipe for adding some sweet italian sausage to the sauce either instead of the pork or along with? Would that be overload?

Many thanks

Brian - New York, NYf

 Brian,
No not overload at all. In fact my grandma used to always add Italian sausage to the sauce along with the braciole and meatballs. You will want to brown the sausage first since it's pork, it will need to cook longer, so sausage goes in the sauce before the meatballs. Also, with that much meat and especially sausage you will have a lot of extra grease added to the sauce. You will notice after a while that you will get puddles of grease floating on the top of the sauce. Be sure to try to remove the grease with a spoon by pushing the round bottom of the spoon into the sauce letting the edge of the spoon ever-so-slightly dip in the grease puddles allowing the grease to go into the spoon and not the sauce. Get a coffee cup, keep it beside the pan and keep removing grease one spoonful at a time periodically throughout the cooking process. Have fun and be sure to let me know how it all came out.

Ciao,

~8-) Anthony


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