All my life I have been
involved with food and farinaceous products like pasta, bread and
confectionery. I grew up with food. I remember on my 21st birthday. I was
working in a bakery called Manna, and my day began at 3 a.m. and ended around
midday. These were normal bakery hours. We used to produce roughly 2000 loaves
of bread an hour, it, strangely enough, today I battle to make one loaf of bread
in my kitchen at home. With Covid, I have a lot more time to practice and today
I have mastered the art of making bread, only to find that it takes the same
amount of effort to make one loaf of bread as it took to make 2000 loaves.
Now with all the time
we have for home cooking, I love to make the Bolognaise sauce my mother used to
make when I was a child. We start at the beginning: we purchase two boxes of
tomatoes and mix them. They are salad tomatoes and plum tomatoes. You clean and
remove the stalks and boil the tomatoes in a big pot for about an hour. Once
they cool down you pass the tomatoes through a mouillee. This removes all the
skins and the pips. From here you bottle the pasala in containers with salt and
refrigerate the containers. For every sauce we make we need about 500g of
pasala.
To start the sauce you
fry up your chopped onions and garlic until they become translucent, just about
8-minutes add your minced beef and oil (you decide on the cooking oil - we use
rough olive oil). Fry the combination until the meat loses its red colour.
Now you add the chopped mushrooms and let them soak in, if
you have any intention of adding chopped chillies or dried tomatoes this is the
time to add it. From here you add the pasala and all your spices. I normally
add oregano, garlic salt, garlic pepperdew seasoning, paprika, mixed Italian
herbs, a touch of cayenne pepper, salt and pepper to taste. At this point, you
can add spices of your own choice like marjoram. But don't over spice the
sauce, you can always add more later, but you cannot take anything away. Coming
from an Italian family, the meat in Bolognese is not as important as a good
tomato. Our preference is to have meat that is very finely ground, and in some
cases, many like to add a portion of pork mince, to the beef mince. You can use
the same sauce for making lasagne, the only difference being that the sauce
must be slightly thicker. This source needs to simmer for anything up to 1½
hours. Many would love to add a glass of red wine to the sauce, the belief
being that it enhances the smell and when the aroma of the wine disappears, the
sauce is ready for the meal.
Whenever anyone mentions to me about smell and aroma my
thoughts immediately drift towards food. Our smelling senses need to be trained
just like our taste buds, we need to treat them as an integral part of our
cooking, but there's one thing that we must always be critically aware of and
that is we actually eat with our eyes.
In the meantime, you will cook 1 kg of pasta. Don't forget
to add salt to the boiling water at least 2 tablespoons. Now add the spaghetti
to the boiling water, but don't break the spaghetti - nothing does more harm to
a good pasta dish than a short length spaghetti. In my mother's house, if you
did that, you would be forced to start all over again. When cooking spaghetti
you never leave the start, you get the water to boil rapidly and you stir the
spaghetti to avoid it sticking. It helps if you add a bit of olive oil when you
come to drain the pasta. The oil prevents any stickiness. The whole cooking
process should be over within 10 minutes, the spaghetti has to be tasted whilst
cooking, you want spaghetti al dente - which means it must be cooked, but still
has a bite. Save a cup full of the cooking water, to be added later. Now we
need to add butter and/or olive oil and 2 raw eggs, and stir, all the eggs do
is add to the flavour and ensure that your pasta stays loose. Whatever happened
to don't want the pasta sticking together? You are now ready for dinner, dish
up the pasta and the Bolognaise sauce and some Parmesan cheese, and you now
have a meal fit for a king.
© Peter Moni
