All of this is the beginnings of my Italian Gravy which I make in a 10 quart stock pot for pennies relative to that jarred swill you find in the store or just as vile, sauce made with canned tomatoes! Yes, yes yes, I get it. Convenience. Time. Blah blah blah. In the dead of winter when there is a poverty of good tomatoes go crazy with your canned jarred self, but in the height of tomato season, it's pretty much a character flaw in my book not to use fresh.
Let's talk tomatoes for a second because just like a carpenter, you need the right tool for the job. Green tomatoes are good for frying and not much else. Cherry tomatoes are great for salads and passed appetizers but they are too labor intensive for sauces. Some people swear by Roma tomatoes in a sauce and while I do like the flavor I find them kind of dry and prefer to use them in salsas not sauces. For my gravy I want big juicy vine ripe "sammich maters". You know the ones. You cut them in big thick slices, slather mayo on white bread, salt, pepper and maters, and eat it leaning over the kitchen sink lest the pinkish mayo juice get on your favorite Izod.
On another note, if you don't own a 10 quart stock pot you should even if you only cook for one. Stocks are pack creatures, they like friends, the more the merrier and it is impossible to make a good stock in a small pot. Besides you'll be freezing this in meal sized bags so might as well make a bunch. Go get yourself a good heavy bottomed stock pot with a lid and you'll have made a friend for life.
Here's the gravy recipe, with a light tomato stock recipe thrown in for good measure.
10#s of super ripe tomatoes. Wash them. Cut a big X in the bottom and drop into 6 quarts of boiling water. Be careful they don't splash you and you can probably only do 8 or so at a time. I find that using the strainer basket tool for stir frying is an easy way to get them in and out of the pot without a scalding. Blanch for 5 minutes. Remove from the water and place in an ice bath. Pull off the skins. Cut out the stem end and any hard shoulders and diced. Keep all the tomato scraps (skins and trimmings) and the water you blanched the tomatoes in. We're going to make stock out of that in a minute
3 HUGE onions, diced
3 HUGE Carrots, peeled and diced
8 - 10 garlic cloves minced
Olive oil
1 cup of red wine
1/2 cup dried parsley
1/8 cup each dried basil, dried Italian seasoning, rosemary, crushed
2 Tea Fennel Seeds
2 Big Pinches Red Pepper flakes
The tomatoes
8 cups of stock (chicken, vegetable, or light tomato, just don't use beef or all your gravies will taste like pot roast)
12 oz of tomato paste
You can also add a couple of pounds of chicken wings but if you do, picking the bones out is a pain so I usually just use stock instead.
Saute the onions, carrots in the olive oil until the onions start to caramelize. Add the garlic and continue sauteing until cooked. Deglaze the pan with the red wine (if you don't know what that means, it means dump in the red wine stir around for a bit) Simmer until the red wine is reduced by half. Add all the herbs and spices and cook for a couple of minutes. Add the tomatoes and the stock. Cover and simmer for at least an hour. Add the tomato paste and go at least another half hour. This makes a ton of gravy. I freeze it in 4 cup portions. It cost me less than 10$ for the vegetables and I had the spices and stock on hand. If we ate nothing but Italian food, it would be enough sauce to make about 2 months worth of meals. It freezes beautifully and can easily go 6 months if not more in the freezer but I wouldn't know because it never lasts that long here at Chez Hagman!
PS. I don't salt my sauces or stocks. They all go into final dishes that I salt when I'm cooking and I just find that if I wait to salt the final dish, I use a lot less salt which is a good thing.
Stocks.
Every time I go to the store and I see the shelf upon shelf of packed salt and chemical water they sell as stock I want to shoot myself. Stocks are so easy to make. So CHEAP to make. So much tastier and better for you, that to buy those EXPENSIVE cartons or cans is just silly. I keep a gallon sized zip lock bag in the freezer and into it I put, onion skins and ends, tomato skins, carrot trimmings, garlic skins and trimmings and if I have it parsnip ends. I save the stems of parsley and those celery stalks that are too sad and floppy to eat but are still good for stock. I get a bag full or when I need some stock, I dump the frozen stuff into 5-6 quarts of water, throw in some pepper corns a bay leaf and simmer it for 20 minutes or more. Let it cool. Freeze it in 4 cup bags. It's like free food to me because you're not buying anything special to make it and when those boxes of swill run almost 4$ per...well that looks like highway robbery to this girl.
In this case, take all the tomato skins, the onion skins and trimmings, carrot peels, some whole garlic cloves and throw them into the water you used to blanch the tomatoes. Simmer for 20 minutes. This makes a light tomato stock that is perfect to use whenever you have a recipe that calls for vegetable stock or even chicken stock unless it's a recipe that you won't like having it dyed a light pink! It's a pretty color, takes advantage of your scrapes and you aren't tossing 6 quarts of water down the drain!
Chicken Stock
Again, scraps. Skin, bones but not the organ meats. Wing tips. Whatever you have or if you're cooking a whole chicken to make chicken salad or some other dish, this is the perfect time to make chicken stock. Put it in a pot with 6 quarts of water. Add an onion, carrot, celery stalk all rough chopped, a couple of bay leaves, some peppercorns and a cinnamon stick. Yes, a cinnamon stick. Bring to a boil and skim off the foam. Reduce to a simmer and if you're cooking the whole chicken, cook until done. Otherwise, simmer for at least 30 minutes or until your house smells like someones Grandmother has taken over your kitchen!
Beef stock is the only complicated stock to make. You'll want a bunch of beef bones and they are hard to come by. If you have a friendly butcher who will hold some out for you great. Otherwise you'll probably end up using beef shanks and then retasking the meat. Again, water, beefy things, garlic, onion, celery, water. Simmer. Skim. Simmer. Voila stock. You can used the meat for soup or some other dish including shredded beef tacos or burritos. If you have the bones, rub them with olive oil and put them in a baking pan with carrots, garlic and onions and roast them until they are golden brown. This takes about an hour. Then dump them into a pot, cover with water and proceed as normal. Beef stock, really needs to be reduced to be as flavorful as it should be. Honestly? I usually substitute chicken or the light tomato stock for beef stock.
On fish stock. I make it but I never freeze it because it goes bad too quickly. When I need fish stock, I have something else on the menu that requires shrimp. I use the shrimp shells and water. It's quicker and easier than using heads and bits and pieces of fish for a true fish stock, no one has ever said to me, wow, this is shrimp stock instead of fish stock. And...if they did....well...it would probably get ugly.
How To Freeze Stocks. Okay, this may sound simple, or maybe I'm not the brightest bulb in the chandelier but it took me years to figure out how to freeze multiple bags of stock without it turning into one icy glob of God only knows what hanging between the rungs of the shelves in the freezer. I've had to use a hair dryer and a hammer to get these globs apart until one day, I had an epiphany! Take a cookie sheet that will fit flatly in your freeze. Spray it with Pam. Add your stock to the bags, press out extra air, and seal. Stack your bags of stock or whatever else you're freezing on the cookie sheet with a good spray of Pam in the middle..this will keep them from sticking to each other and tearing when you try to pull them apart. Freeze then you can stack flat or stand them up like books. Safes a ton of space in the fridge and makes it easy to use them when you need them!
Confessional! Sometimes, we are cooking and we get busy doing something else or we forgot to turn down the burner and we burn something. I did this today! Here's the thing. The odds are good, if you catch the burn quick enough, and your nose will usually clue you in in time, that you haven't ruined the whole dish but have just burnt some of the dish, probably in the center of the pot. What to do? Well, first, don't panic. Second, get the food off the heat. Third, and most importantly, DON'T STIR IT. If you carefully dump the contents of your pot into a colander, the truly burnt pieces will adhere to the bottom of the pan. That's why no stirring. You don't want them contaminating the whole dish. Once you've seperated the good from the bad, rinse your pot out. Add fresh oil. If all you burnt was vegetables, rinse them off. Yep, you heard me. If you burnt meat up, that's a bit trickier. Make sure you got all the charred bits out. Put everything back in the pot, re season (easy on the salt if you already seasoned it) and cook for a couple of minutes then sniff. If the dish smells or tastes charred, shrug and pitch it. I find though that most of the time, I'm good to go and don't end up ditching an entire dish when only a little bit was charred.
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