2004 August 28th - Recipe/video log of making Z's famouse meat sauce.

It's a meat sauce, so we start browning the meat. First I brown the italian sausage (10 full links, this is just frying pan 1 of 2).	And there's meatballs. 2lbs of lean hamburger, two egg yolks, italian seasoned bread crumbs and enough garlic powder to cover it all when it's in the bowl. Mix it together with your hands and start making the meatballs. You need to brown the meatballs all over. We're just browning them so they don't fall apart when they actually cook in the sauce.
Z's recipe called for Pork Fillets, but my grocery store didn't have any fillets. So, the fillet comes out of the tenderloin so...	Cut up the tenderloin into fillets and viola!
Browning the pork fillets.	There it is...mmm look at that grease. Meatballs, sausage and pork fillets. Save the drippings/grease. The drippings go into the sauce. I browned the meat the night before, put the drippings into a jar and placed it in the fridge overnight. The drippings will sit in the fridge overnight, the burnt particles will settle to the bottom and the grease will congeal on top. It's that icky congealed stuff on top that we want in the sauce, not the burnt bits.
Ok, here we are the next morning. Everything is stacked up and ready to go: 3-4lbs mushrooms 1 bunch of celery 3 green bell peppers Tomato Sauce (two 5lb cans or about 220oz.) 2 bulbs of garlic 1 big yellow onion 3-4 tablespoons of black pepper. Oh ya...the meat!	mmm...the MEAT!
mmmm...mushrooms!	Everything else. Oh ya...it takes about 35 minutes to chop this all up. Garlic - Diced Mushrooms - Quartered Celery - Chopped Peppers - Chopped Don't worry...it'll all cook down alot.
All vegetable ingredients are in there along with the pepper.	The meat is in and now it's time to get things up to temperature. Start heating the sauce up slowly. The most important thing at this stage is DON'T BURN THE SAUCE. Bring it's temperature up slowly, stirring every 5 minutes.
Five minutes later...stirring again. You are a slave to this sauce for the next hour or so. It takes gallons of sauce quite a awile to get up to temperature. You can actually feel on the side of the pot how high up the heat has gotten to.	It's been about a half and hour and I have my electric stove set at 3.5. Still stirring every 5 minutes.
Once it get's into bubbling nicely you can bring it down to a simmer and let it go another 5 hours. Keep stirring every 5 minutes until the bubbling settles down to just burping from time to time. Then just stir every 20 minutes.	Ahhh...five or six hours later, aside from taking blurry photographs, you can now have some meat sauce. That stringy stuff is the pork fillet that is now falling apart in the sauce. Oh ya...almost forgot. It's all about the cheese, the Romano cheese to me more precise. Want to ruin a good sauce...put Kraft Parmesan in it. Get a good wedge of Romano and grate it yourself.

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