Best Food Writing 2015 (25 page)

            
2½ teaspoons freshly ground black pepper

            
Kosher salt, to taste

            
2 cups flour

            
1½ teaspoons dark chile powder

            
1½ teaspoons filé powder

            
1 teaspoon cayenne

            
1 teaspoon ground white pepper

            
1 teaspoon paprika

            
3 cloves garlic, minced

            
3 stalks celery, minced

            
1 green bell pepper, minced

            
1 jalapeño, minced

            
1 poblano pepper, minced

            
1 yellow onion, minced

            
12 cups chicken stock

            
1 lb. andouille, halved and sliced

            
12 ounces okra, trimmed and sliced ½ inch thick

            
Sliced scallions, for garnish

            
Cooked white rice, for serving

            
1. Heat 1¼ cups oil in an 8-qt. Dutch oven until a deep-fry thermometer reads 350°. Season chicken with 1 teaspoon black pepper and salt; toss with ½ cup flour. Working in batches, fry chicken until golden; transfer to paper towels to drain.

            
2. Add remaining flour to Dutch oven; whisk until smooth. Reduce heat to medium-low; cook, whisking, until color of roux is dark chocolate, 1–1½ hours. Add remaining black pepper, the chile and filé powders, cayenne, white pepper, paprika, garlic, celery, bell pepper, jalapeño, poblano, and onion; cook until soft, 10–12 minutes. Add stock; boil. Reduce heat to medium-low; cook, stirring occasionally and skimming fat as needed, until slightly thickened, about 30 minutes. Add reserved chicken; cook until chicken is cooked through, about 45 minutes. Add andouille; cook until chicken is falling off the bone, about 1 hour.

            
3. Using tongs, transfer chicken to a cutting board and let cool slightly; shred, discarding skin and bones, and return to pot. Heat remaining oil in a 12-inch skillet over medium-high. Cook okra until golden brown and slightly crisp, 8–10 minutes, then stir into gumbo; cook 15 minutes. Garnish with scallions; serve with rice.

In Search of Ragu
In Search of Ragu

B
Y
M
ATT
G
OULDING

From Roads & Kingdoms

          
Though he's based in North Carolina and Barcelona, journalist Matt Goulding—chief editor and publisher of this digital travel magazine (
roadsandkingdoms.com
)—seems happiest on the road, especially if food's involved. He's a sucker for rooted food traditions, like the classic ragu sauces of Emilia Romagna.

La Grassa
. The fat one. Bologna has earned its nickname like no other city on earth. The old city is awash in excess calories, a medieval fortress town fortified with golden mountains of starch and red cannons of animal fat, where pastas gleam a brilliant yellow from the lavish amount of egg yolks they contain and menus moan under the weight of their meat-and-cheese-burdened offerings.

I long dreamt of nuzzling up to Bologna's ample waistline. As a high school kid with a burgeoning romance with the kitchen, I was hungry to consummate my love with what I regarded as the world's finest cuisine. The intermediary was a young, heavyset Italian-American named Mario Batali. Every morning at 10:30 during summer break, I sunk into our Chianti-red couch and watched the chef with orange clogs and a matching cheddar ponytail motormouth his way across Italy, breaking down the regional cooking of the country in exquisite three-plate daily tasting menus. I wanted to taste the bulging breads of Puglia, the neon green pestos of Liguria, the simmering fish stews of Le Marche. The pepper-bombed pastas of Lazio. But above all, I wanted to feast on the Italy of Molto Mario's most spirited episodes, the Italy of
Parmigiano
(“the undisputed king of cheeses!”), of mortadella and
culatello
, and, of course, the Italy of
ragù alla bolognese
, the most lavish and revered of all pasta creations.

It took a broken heart to bring me to Bologna's bulging belly. I fell in love with a girl in Barcelona who didn't share my lofty feelings, so I escaped to Bologna to drown my rejection in a bottomless bowl of meat sauce. For three weeks I sought out ragu in any form possible: caught in the tangles of fresh
tagliatelle
, plugging the tiny holes of cheesy tortellini, draped over forest green handkerchiefs of spinach lasagna.

Since the dawn of Christianity, Emilia Romagna—birthplace of ragu, home of the city of Bologna—has been one of Europe's wealthiest regions, a center of trade with a heavy agricultural presence. Few things say wealth as loudly as a sauce comprised of three or four cuts of meat, two kinds of fat, wine, milk, and a flurry of one of the world's most treasured cheeses—all served on a pasta so dense with egg yolk it looks a sunset run through a paper shredder.

Slow-simmered meat stews were common throughout Italy in the 15th and 16th centuries, but pasta, a luxury enjoyed by the upper class until the industrial revolution made wheat more accessible, didn't enter the equation until the early 19th century, when the aristocrats of Emilia Romagna found it in their hearts and wallets to combine the two. Pellegrino Artusi, a successful businessman and noted gastronome, is often credited with the first published recipe for
ragù alla bolognese
, dating back to 1891 in the self-published
The Science of Cooking and the Art of Fine Dining
. Not satisfied with the panoply of meats and cooking fats, Artusi recommends goosing the dish with porcini, chicken livers, sliced truffles, and a glass of heavy cream.

Just as Artusi's version reflected his privileged times as a wealthy merchant carousing about Emilia Romagna in the mid 19th century, ragu has always been a barometer of sorts, a dish that closely mirrors the conditions of its makers. Substantial meat-heavy ragus took hold in the relatively fat times of the early 20th century, but in the hardscrabble years after World War II, pasta found itself nearly naked, slicked with lard and vegetable scraps and little else. Only as Italy climbed out of the post-war depression in the 1950s and '60s did meat rejoin the script as the recipe's central constituent.

Over the years, other parts of Italy developed their own take on the
bubbling meat sauce. (And let it be said now that sauce is a misnomer—sauce implies a level of liquidity that you'll never find in a true ragu. Instead, the Italians would call it a
condimento
, a condiment meant to accompany the pasta, not smother it relentlessly)
Ragù alla Barese
, from the heart of Puglia, is made from thin slices of meat—pork, beef, lamb, even horse—with the sauce served over
orecchiette
, ear-shaped pasta, and the protein eaten separately. Italy's second most famous ragu after Bologna's belong to Naples, where a giant vat of tomato sauce is used to render huge chunks of meat fork-tender (the inspiration for Italian-America's Sunday gravy). But the scope of ragu goes well beyond these famous offshoots: Travel Italy today and you'll find ragus made from fish, duck, and wild boar, laced with everything from cumin to dried chili to chocolate.

Through all these years and all these iterations, Emilia Romagna has remained ground zero for Italy's ragu culture, but even here, the differences between one village's ragu and the next can be a catalyst for controversy and recrimination.

Of course, uniformity was never part of the equation: from the start,
ragù alla bolognese
has been a reflection of subtle differences in terrain, weather, and wealth that defined one town from the next throughout the region.

Today, the list of variables runs longer than the list of ingredients. Is ragu pure pork? Pure beef? A mixture? Is the meat ground, chopped by hand or braised and shredded? Does pancetta or another type of cured pork product belong in the mix? How about liquid: stock or water, red wine or white? In some parts of the region, where dairy cows are aplenty, milk makes it into the sauce; in other parts, it's considered sacrilege. Spices: salt, maybe pepper, usually bay leaf, sometimes, in rare cases, nutmeg.

The biggest source of dispute, undoubtedly, is the tomato: How much, if any? Fresh, canned, or tomato paste?

So is there one true ragu? One best way to make it? One expression of this meaty amalgam that best represents the DNA of this region? That's what I've come back to Emilia Romagna to find out.

Twenty miles outside of Bologna, at a roadside restaurant, I meet Alessandro Martini, short and thick and boiling over with life. He runs Italian Days Food Experience, a full-day binge on Emilia Romagna's
most famous ingredients: cured meats,
Parmigiano Reggiano, aceto balsamico di Modena
(“12 years aging minimum!” as Alessandro likes to say). His Facebook page is dominated by pictures of tourists feeding each other pasta, hoisting massive hunks of cheese, slurping 100-year-old balsamic from plastic spoons. On any given day, depending on the whims of TripAdvisor's algorithms, Alessandro's tour is the most popular activity in all of Europe.

For a short period in 2010, Alessandro was my truffle dealer, sending freshly-dug specimens across the Mediterranean one kilo at a time, which I would keep under my pillow for a few days until my dreams smelled of tubers, before selling them off to Michelin-starred chefs around Barcelona. I remember waking up to messages from Alessandro during those heady days after an early morning truffle hunt: “I have the white gold!”

Alessandro hails from the heart of ragu country and lives for these types of belt-loosening food adventures. This is a man who celebrated the birth of both his son and his daughter by gifting them batteries of
aceto di balsamico
—a series of wooden barrels that hold balsamic vinegar as it ages over the course of a lifetime. When I emailed him two weeks before the trip and asked him to be my guide, his answer was short and definitive: “Si! Si! We go to see the best Italian grandmas and the ragu kings. Don't worry!”

We start in the hilltop town of Zocca at Ristorante Bonfiglioli. An hour before lunch service, the kitchen looks like what I see when I close my eyes and see Italy at night. All women, mostly grandmas, all performing backbreaking acts of an intensely nurturing and homemade nature. One rolls out long sheets of emerald green spinach pasta for
lasagne verde
. Another fries little rectangles of dough for
gnocchi fritti
. A pair of older women in bonnets stuff hundreds of pasta squares with a mix of ground pork, mortadella, and parmesan before pinching them into tortellini. In the corner, over a lone burner, a younger woman stirs a pot that, judging by the savory perfume, can only contain one thing.

When Alessandro announces that we've come to talk ragu, the flurry of activity comes to a sudden halt and the women gather around the mountain of tortellini.

“Well, what do you want to know?” the young sauce-stirrer asks.

“Everything,” I say.

And that's pretty much all it takes. The women launch into their personal recipes, exchanging barbs about protein choices and seasoning philosophies. Finally, Zia Maria Lanzarini, the oldest cook in the kitchen, quiets the crowd and offers some well-earned wisdom.

“The meat can change based on the circumstances. The liquid can, too. But the one thing a ragu never has in it is garlic.”

The only other point of agreement among the group: ragu should be made with pignoletto, an acidic, lightly fruity wine that you can see growing from the restaurant's windows. “It's a Bolognese sauce, it should be made with a Bolognese wine.”

The official version at Bonfiglioli, what Alessandro calls “the noble ragu,” would be a source of controversy for most in the area—including, apparently, a few of the cooks in this kitchen. It is made from 100 percent beef, a rarity in the region but an act of recycling in a restaurant with mountains of beef scraps leftover from the strip steaks they are famous for. Those scraps are combined with onion, carrot, and celery, a few glugs of pignoletto, plus peeled and seeded fresh tomatoes, and simmered for four hours, the cook adding water at her discretion if the ragu starts to dry out.

“The cooking is the most important part in that it must be slow,” says Signore Elena, Maria's tortelloni accomplice. “It's the slow cooking that gives the sauce its flavor.”

She passes me a spoon and the ragu, a gentle orange color from the emulsion of tomato and fat, sits up like a well-trained dog. It tastes of the mineral intensity of good Italian beef corrupted by nothing more than light tomato acidity and the sweetness from the vegetables. The women try to ply us with other delights of the Emilian kitchen, and I start to give in, but Alessandro intercedes and ushers me to the door. The day is young.

Three hilltops over, at Trattoria Garofani Lina, we sit down to a light lunch of spinach
gramigna
, hollow fish hooks of pasta, with sausage ragu;
polpette
, massive, dense meatballs made from pork, beef, chicken, mortadella and an absurd amount of parmesan; thick shanks of osso buco; tomato-braised rabbit al cacciatore; and
tortellini en brodo
.

We are surrounded by cyclists; runners; large, spirited families—people in need of sustenance. Alessandro loves this restaurant, and for good reason: the food is intensely satisfying, especially the chewy pile
of
gramigna
, hiding nubs of sausage in its knots, and the tortellini, another Emilia Romganan specialty, which are belly buttons of ground pork, mortadella, and parmesan afloat in a clear, soul-soothing chicken broth.

But after a few bites of the ragu, he flashes me a look of disappointment: “I'm sorry my friend. The ragu is good, it is fine, but there is too much
doppio concentrato
. Tomato paste has no place in ragu!” To hear Alessandro say these words about a restaurant he himself selected, one in which the owners greet him with hugs and ask about his children, underscores just how hard it is to please an Italian—especially with ragu.

As we waddle our way back towards his van, he tells me: “These are great examples for a beginner, but later, I will show you the true ragu.”

The rest of my week in Emilia Romagna is a blur of ground pork and durum wheat. I spend days in Bologna, plodding from one restaurant to the next, faithfully ordering
tagliatelle al ragu
even when my stomach cries out for clear liquids or a few green leaves of vegetation.

Bologna is my kind of town: ancient in its cobbled avenues but youthful in its constituency, big enough to capture a certain urban energy, but small enough to never need anything other than your two feet to take it all in. Above all, it's a civilization seemingly constructed for the sole purpose of eating.

Everywhere you turn you will see signs of its place at the top of the Italian food chain: fresh pasta shops vending every possible iteration of egg and flour; buzzing bars pairing Spritz and Lambrusco with generous spreads of free meat, cheese, and vegetable snacks; and, above all, osteria after osteria, cozy wine-soaked eating establishments, from whose ancient kitchens emit a moist fragrance of simmered pork and local grapes.