Gregs Great Spaghetti
 

Ok, here's what you need:

1 bottle good merlot
2 32 oz cans of crushed tomatoes
1 large onion
2 clusters of garlic
1.5 lbs spicy italian sausage
misc. spices
1 Fresh chunk (not grated!) of Pamesean cheese.

Start by removing the skin from the sausage and chopping it into small chunks. Peel lots of garlic and chop the sections into quarters. Also chop the onion. Toss all this stuff into a large pot and begin to brown.

After the meat is cooked, and the garlic and onions are soft, turn the heat up and thoroughly brown everything.

When the bottom of the pan turns brown and the sausage starts to dry out, deglaze the pot by pouring in a little wine and stirring the contents. Do this several times as the contents begin to 'dry' out. Don't use more than 1/4'th of a bottle of wine. Be carefull not to actually burn the contents or your sauce will taste like charred wood.

If you want to use fresh chopped tomatoes instead of the canned variety, add them little by little. Otherwise...

pour in the crushed tomatoes, add salt and spices (basic italian seasoning, one bay leaf, pepper, etc.) and let everything cook down for a couple of hours. Add a little wine if necessary.

As everything cooks, the sauce will go from bright red to a dark blood red/almost purple color.

Right before dinnertime, cook the spaghetti (I actually prefer linguine) in a large pot of water with plenty of salt, and cut/grate the fresh parmesean cheese.


When you serve this, use plenty of cheese. Fresh parmesean tastes and behaves drastically different than that stuff in the can. It is much more aromatic and mellow, and it will melt into the sauce.

Oh, and serve the rest of the wine with dinner.

Or... Drink the rest of that bottle while you're cooking and serve another bottle of the same wine at dinner.

Kudos for stressing the importance of quality ingredients, espcially the parmesan and the wine. There's no such thing as 'cooking wine', if it's not good enough to drink, it's not good enough to cook with.

Spoken like a true chef. Always drink when you cook!

Great recipe.

Alton Brown actually suggests that you cook tomato sauce with red wine. He said that it's one of the few things that can bring out certain flavors in the tomato.

I'd love to make this recipe sometime, but my wife would only eat the cheese. She's a wee bit picky. How sad is that?

I can tell that this will be a good recipe.

Variation. Place a pork chop or two in the bottom of your pot and add the wet ingredients and simmer.

Great recipe Greg700! I made it two nights ago with a few alterations.

I left out the onions, used more garlic, and added some fresh basil. It was so good my wife (majorly picky eater) actually loved it.

Thanks!

Greg,
Just wanted to let you know that i copied the recipe down as soon as I saw it and finally cooked it up for the wifey for Valentine's Day. It came out.......AWESOME! I was a little worried about all the onions but i trusted you and it turned out sooooooo good. The onions and garlic cook down to almost nothing as I thought they would.
Thanks for posting!

ps......i think your sauce is an aphrodesiac. ;) ;)

I'm glad you guys liked the spaghetti.

You'll have to cook it for me some time greg, or come over and let me cook it for ya :).

Nice recipe man.

Used your spaghetti recipe this weekend Greg. Substituted 1 lb sweet italian turkey sausage and 1 lb ground white turkey meat instead of 1.5 lbs sausage to lower fat content of sauce. I added a little crushed red pepper and a few other spices. Dude, came out really great. Thanks for the line. By the way, I'm not sure what a cluster of garlic is, but I used about 8-10 cloves of fresh garlic and crushed them. I recommend the recipe to anyone. Excellent stuff.