Orecchiette with Braciole alla Barese

 

Okay, y'all, I have discovered a new food blog, and it is awesome.  The Pasta Project is a blog run by a British woman named Jacqui, and it's an insanely intricate labor of love.  You should all go there.  It's the best food blog I've ever seen.  It's like an active pasta cookbook, that's always growing, and that's inexplicably free.  Also, the author doesn't waste everyone's time with her tirades and opinions, unlike a couple of jokers I could name, she just gives a little context about the recipe and then puts it up.

And I'm here to tell you that the recipes, or at least the one I tried, work really, really well.  

How did I discover this?  Someone asked me what a good food to go with Primitivo wine was.  For those who don't know, Primitivo is the Italian name for Zinfandel.  (Some, including my treacherous wife, claim they're not exactly the same varietal, but they're at least damn similar.)  Now, I could have rattled off foods that would have gone great with Zin, like grilled pork sausage and potato salad, or venison backstrap with huckleberries, but I didn't want to do that.  The person didn't ask me about Zin, they asked me about Primitivo.  Not naming an Italian dish seemed like the lazy way out. 

I have a pretty persistent belief that a good rule of thumb is that food from a region goes well with wine from that region.  This isn't really true with new world wine, of course.  Otherwise, Napa cab would be perfect with avocado toast and cioppino.  No, I'm talking about old world wines, where the local cuisine and the local wine coevolved.  What's Alsace known for?  Riesling, and also pork sausage, goose, sauerkraut, and river fish.  What's Piedmont known for?  Nebbiolo, and also chestnuts, truffles, mushrooms, and wine-braised meats.  See what I'm saying?  It's not the be-all-end-all, of course, but it's a good place to start, when looking for inspiration in wine pairing.

So anyway, back to Primitivo.  The best, and most highly rated, Primitivos are from Puglia, also known as the 'heel of the boot.'  I turned to that great font of knowledge, Wikipedia.  (I know, I have a couple of really good books on regional Italian cuisine, but the shelf was all the way across the room, you know how it is.)  Wikipedia has improved as a food knowledge resource about 1000% over the last decade.  You won't find recipes, but you will find responsibly curated articles about regional cuisines from all over the world, and you don't even need to leave the couch.  So anyway, Wikipedia claimed that the traditional ragu of Puglia was made of beef braciole (which is apparently the plural, just learned that, the singular is braciola), braised out till tender in tomato sauce.  Braciole are time-consuming meat roulades.  Cooking a ragu with them instead of meatballs is completely insane, from a labor standpoint.  Naturally, I had to try it.  I went looking for a recipe, found Jacqui's, and noted that she had the cook larding the beef rolls with lardo (rosemary-flavored, salt-cured pork fat).  It was an omen.  I had a lardo coming off-cure in less than a month.  I got myself a bottle of Primitivo and waited.

Here it is.  It was a challenge to find a decent Primitivo in Charleston.  There are some producers that make really nice stuff, retailing for $100 bucks a bottle (not that I needed that), but here in town, most Primitivos you run into are grocery-store level.  Reason being, Primitivo isn't as dry and complex as the big bopper Italian reds (Brunello, Barolo, Taurasi, etc.), but also not Zinfandel-y enough to please fans of iconic American Zins (Turley {yay!}, Rombauer {boo}).  So nicer ones don't really sell.  I finally found one by Torcicoda, a 2015, so it had a little age on it, for like $23.  Nothing special, but it would do.  It was nice!  Primitivo, like Zinfandel, is high-alcohol and low-tannin, so it be a little insipid, but it makes up for that with big, round flavor, and enough acid to carry the richness.

I followed the recipe judiciously.  Here it is, copy-pasting it into a link was a lot easier than retyping it, plus, y'all need to check this blog out.  I'll just give a quick overview, make notes of any changes or adjustments, and then report the results.

Overview: 

Here's the assembly line for the braciole.  Slices of round (I used eye of round), topped with lardo, hot pepper (I used oil-packed Calabrian chiles), flakes of parmigiano, minced garlic, parsley, salt, and pepper.  From here, they get rolled up, pinned with toothpicks, seared in a little melted lardo with olive oil and onion, then deglazed with wine (white or red, I used cheap, shitty rose), and braised out in tomato puree, with cherry tomatoes and basil leaves.

Once the ragu was done, it's tossed with some oricchiette (little ears), the (apparently) iconic pasta shape of Puglia, and topped with slivers of parmigiano and more basil leaves.

I didn't really change much.  She has you sweating the onions, and then browning the meat rolls in the same pan.  This didn't seem like it would actually brown the meat, at least not without burning the onions, so I did that in the reverse order.  Also, she said she browned the rolls in a skillet and moved them to a dutch oven, which makes me wonder how big that skillet was, because there was no way that'd be possible in mine.  Instead, I took a heavy pot (large enough to hold the whole batch) and a skillet, seared the beef in both, then added them all into the same pot, deglazed the skillet into the other pot with the wine, and it all worked out just fine.  Oh, and she called for passato rustico, which is an extra thick tomato puree that doesn't really exist in American grocery stores, so I just used 80/20 Pom strained tomatoes and Cento paste.  

The Results:  Really pretty great.  The ragu was one of the best tasting red sauces I've ever had, redolent, as it was, with pork fat.  Salt carefully, you won't need much.  The lardo brings a lot of seasoning to the party, so taste before you leap.  My only issue was that the meat didn't get all that tender in the time allotted.  She said to cook it for 90 minutes to 2 hours.  At the 90 minute mark it was still tough as old boots.  At two hours it was okay.  At two hours twenty, it was just starting to get there, but I had to get to my Zoom D&D game (I know, I know, shut up), so I went ahead and started the pasta.  The meat could have been a bit tender, but I also get how difficult it is to accurately state braise times.  The lower a heat you're working with, the greater the standard deviation for the cook time.  Want to cook a filet steak in a 450 degree oven?  5-15 minutes.  Want to braise a short rib?  2-10 hours.  So I'm not upset or anything.  Anyway, once we started eating it, I realized I needn't have worried.  The meat was a little dry, and could have been a bit more tender, but the fact that it was rilled into a pinwheel with pork fat and cheese really mitigated the textural issues.  Still, if I could do it all over again, I'd have added another hour of low, slow cooking.  Still, the dish was excellent.  I'm being picky.  4/5.

And the thing is, eye of round sucks.  It's, like, easily the worst cut of beef on the whole steer.  It's not tender enough to be a steak, and it's too lean to be really good as a braise.  Oh, and it doesn't have enough fat to grind.  It's truly the jack-of-no-trades on a cow carcass.  The only thing you can do with it to really make it great is jacquard the hell out of it, soak it in buttermilk, roll it in flour seasoned with salt and black pepper, and pan-fry it.  Who doesn't like a good CFS?

But as a strategy to breathe some life into the crappiest piece of beef on the whole cow, these little bracioles are pretty damn awesome.  Definitely worth the effort, although I don't see myself making this again anytime soon.

Oh, one more thing.  At the end of the night, after dinner was over, wine was consumed, goblins were vanquished, and more wine was consumed, I put one of the bracioles in a hot dog bun with some Duke's, and it was awesome, and I apologize for nothing.

-JS