Well, it's official: I have made the best pasta sauce I have ever made, holy fuck is this good. I've been perfecting the recipe for a while, I pieced it together over years of cooking.
Start with olive oil and put it on medium heat, and add salt and pepper, balsamic vinegar, and a whole yellow onion, chopped up but not too fine, and some minced garlic, maybe 2 cloves (I also add a splash of pistachio oil but it's only because my mom got me a bottle of it for Christmas and I have it, might as well use it, I don't think it makes much difference). Add 1 nice, raw sweet Italian sausage, squeeze the meat out of the casing (or use uncased) and cook it all until the onions
lightly caramelize. Then add another chopped yellow onion, a chopped shallot, and 2 more cloves of garlic, plus 3 large carrots cut into small chunks. Cook that until the new onions lightly caramelize. Then add 3 or more pounds of crushed or sliced fresh tomatoes, preferably out of the garden because they're SO much better than from the store. Then also add another half of a chopped yellow onion and 2 cloves of minced garlic (adding them in stages gives you the full flavors of a range of caramelization levels). Let them start to simmer, the tomatoes will release a lot of water. Once you see where the water level is, add chicken/vegetable stock or water (this time I used some chicken and asparagus stock I made), plus some white wine of your choice (I use pino grigio usually), to more than cover the vegetables, until they're swimming in plenty of it, oh and add some more balsamic vinegar. Also add some savory herbs at this point... I like to use oregano, thyme, rosemary, and fennel. This time I used some spicy oregano from the garden, some thyme from the garden, some dried rosemary, and a couple of generous pinches of fennel seed.
You can't use too much liquid, because what you're trying to do is simmer the sauce until the liquid evaporates enough to make it saucy, but the more liquid there is the longer it will have to cook. The idea is to cook it for a good 3 hours or more, stirring every so often especially as it cooks down lower. It should just be a low simmer, don't cook it too hard. When it starts to get thicker, after it's been cooking for a couple of hours, use a potato masher or something to mash up all the chunks as best as you can... the result is a rustic chunky sauce. You could use a mixer to blend it more, or a blender after it's done to make it smooth, but I like chunky sauces personally. Continue to cook it down until the consistency is right. There you go!
I love cooking.
