Sunday Gravy

Made a big batch of Sunday gravy this past weekend. If you're unfamiliar, "gravy" is what many Italian-American families call meat tomato sauce. Traditionally cooked every Sunday, chances are if you grew up in New York or Jersey your mother or grandmother would be making a big pot of this each weekend.

Before we can make gravy we need to make some meatballs. Here I have the ingredients:

~3 pounds ground beef (chuck preferable)
~1 pound ground pork
Breadcrumbs soaked in milk (homemade or store-bought, if unseasoned then add some salt, pepper, dried herb)
Chopped onion
Chopped garlic
1 egg per pound of meat
Grated cheese (parmigiano reggiano is typical, though I used pecorino romano here as it's what I had on hand)

You'll notice the very large bowls of garlic and onion. I had other uses for these (coming up) so I chopped a lot to use later. Same with the cheese, as I want some for later and to have throughout the week.

Combine your meat with your eggs. Add onion and garlic to taste (a couple spoons, I like a good bit of garlic). Same for cheese, add some according to how much you like cheese. Combine. Add spoonfuls of the soaked crumbs until the mixture comes together. I will show you how it should look in the next picture.

Here's the end result of the mixture. You want something that will hold its shape. Not too dry, not too wet. It'll take a couple times to get it how you like, but cooking is mostly experimentation in my opinion, and seeing what you like.

Dont do something gross

Grab a walnut sized chunk of the meat and toss is between your hands until it's compacted a good bit. After a bit of practice you'll not even need to roll it. Using this method you keep the fat in the meat from melting onto your hand and instead will keep it in the meatball, where we want!

Also notice in the previous picture how there's lots of leftover soaked crumbs. I soaked too many, so I'll put them in a dish and figure out something to do with them later on in the week.

Also feel free to ask questions if you don't understand something.

Nothing gross here, my friend.

Heat a pan on medium, then add some oil after it's hot. I use regular old olive oil, not extra virgin (save that for something where the flavor will come through, like a salad). You'll notice I'm using a nonstick pan. While I would never use a nonstick for frying at a high temperature, your results will be fine when you're working on medium heat.

Add some meatballs to the pan and let them cook on each side. If you are uncomfortable with frying or don't want to, bake them at 375 for 30 minutes or so. But frying will produce a more desirable taste and texture.

Keep turning them, and browning all sides. See the nice crust forming, that's just pure flavor.

One advantage that deep-frying them has it that they will keep their shape better. We don't mind having a meatball with a side or two flat. Restaurants will typically deep fry them.

Here's a shot of the inside. The color in the picture makes it look pink, but it was cooked all the way through. Note that I drained the oil halfway through the batch as it was getting a little dark. Don't want anything to take on a burned flavor.

All fried and done. Drain them on paper towels and set them aside. I froze half of these for another day as I didn't need so many.

Now to begin the sauce itself. Here's what I used:

2 #10 cans of imported Italian plum tomatoes (I buy these at Costco, they're less than $4 per can)
2 12 oz cans of tomato paste, any old generic brand
Chopped onion
Chopped garlic
Meat

For the meat you will use whatever you have. You want some beef and some pork. Here I have some "country style ribs", which are just cut strips of pork shoulder (like you'd use for pulled pork), and some boneless beef short ribs.

Open your tomatoes and crush them. I do it by hand so I don't have to bother chopping and I don't have to clean the food processor. Each tomato will have a little hard piece that at one time connected to the stem. Get a bowl and set these aside to throw away later (not pictured). Grab each tomato and gently squeeze it so it won't shoot juice everywhere, then crush it. After they're all in the bowl, stick your hand in and crush back and forth until there are no big chunks in. Got some help from my wife here as I had two big cans to do.

A shot of the meat. Two packages of country style ribs, some beef short ribs, and what was labeled as a "breakfast steak." I suspect it was just a piece of eye of round that they sold for cubed steak (obviously this hasn't been cubed). Typically you'll want something with lots of connective tissue/fat to break down and flavor the sauce. But alas, they only had the one pack of short ribs, and you use what you have.

I used two large pots for this batch as I wanted lots leftover to freeze and/or give away. Put some olive oil in your pot and begin searing your meat. Here's some of the pork.

Forgot to mention I also had 4 sweet Italian sausages. Here's all the meat seared, one plate per pot. You can see I had my heat a little too high and it burst some of my sausages!

Dang... How many people are you feeding?

Add some chopped onion to your pot and cook it down with a good bit of salt for a few minutes. This is to taste. If you like onion then add more. Or if you don't like onion so much, cut it down or omit it.

Just my wife and I. But I made a very large batch for freezing (shown later).

After the onion is cooked down a bit, add some garlic, also according to your taste. Watch you don't burn it. Notice all the brown bits scraped up off the bottom: more flavor going into the gravy.

After your onion and garlic are cooked, add some tomato paste. Mash it into the onion/garlic and cook it down. This adds some more intense tomato flavor.

This is after about ten minutes of cooking. You see how the tomato paste darkens and will take on a deeper flavor.

After your paste is cooked down real good, add your tomatoes you crushed, your meat, and enough water to come pretty close to the top of the pot. Some might wonder, why water? Well, as we are cooking this all day, we want there to be enough liquid so the meat and everything else get cooked real well. As the water evaporates the flavor will intensify. If we didn't add the water we'd evaporate all of our tomato liquid and get a gravy that's TOO thick (and we would probably burn it too).

After you bring everything to a simmer, drop the heat to low, and cook as long as you can. Here's a shot after two hours.

Here's how it looks after four hours. Check out the stains along the side of the pan and use that to see how much we've evaporated! Take an old knife (not one you want to keep especially sharp) and scrape down those sides back into the pot: more flavor.

After about five hours (or longer if you have time), fish all the meat out aside from the meatballs and sausages and shred/chop it up.

I might have forgotten earlier when I said to add the meat to the pot along with the tomatoes, that INCLUDES the meatballs and sausages. I'm sorry.

After chopping, put it back in the pot.

Here's how she looks at the end of the whole process. Meat added back, sausages and meatballs in the sauce too.

Meantime, add lots of water to a big pot and put the heat on high, and turn on your broiler.

And I forgot my picture too. Damn.

I got a pretty crusty Italian loaf for some garlic bread. It's my wife's request and sometimes I think she might like the bread better than the main meal! Cut some slices 1/2-3/4 inch thick.

I made a mixture of softened butter, salt, dried herb, and some of our garlic leftover from earlier. Spread it all over your bread slices, then slide those babies under the broiler for ~5 minutes or until they get nice and crispy. Meantime salt your pasta water heavily.

When I went to the store to get pasta I just grabbed two boxes of generic brand rigatoni. I should've looked closely... they're half rigatoni! Don't know if I got a weird batch or what. The package made no indication they'd be small.

Cook your pasta until al dente (a bite right at the end of your chew).

Watch you don't burn your garlic bread.

Here's the bread, good and crispy.

Drain your pasta, don't ever rinse. Many pasta dishes will call for finishing in the sauce, and that is a very good method for most dishes. When it comes to a big pot of gravy like this, I just slop some over the pasta and call it a day. Not pictured is some of the pecorino from earlier that I added on top.

And here's the leftovers. My wife and I will eat that big bowl throughout the week for dinner. All and all I ended up with six quarts leftover, and will thaw them when we want gravy next time!

If anyone is ITT I hope you enjoyed the pictures and I'll keep monitoring to answer questions later if someone has some. Thanks for checking out my gravy.

>Dang... How many people are you feeding?

Not the OP, but when you make something like this, you should always go large and make more than you need, because the sauce actually improves over time, even if you freeze it.

Drive on, OP.

Trick for you OP:

-when adding tomato paste into anything, mix it with broth to aid whatever you're trying to do with it in the pot. If you want to mix it in with your ingredients and actually cook it down and brown it a bit, just add enough broth to make it spread easier, but not enough to make it soupy. If you're not worried about browning it, add more broth to make it flow even faster.

You had me up until...

>enough water to come pretty close to the top

That gravy will be twice as good if you use a beef stock or broth instead of water, dude. Get some beef bones from your butcher, or the meat section in your supermarket, and just toss them into a stock pot with some water and simmer those bastards overnight and use that for your gravy, or any other meat sauce.

Not bad, regardless.

Good thread OP. I consider my meatball game strong but I still use sauce straight from the jar. This sauce looks really tasty

Bumpetto

Sometimes I use this method too. Thanks, friend.

I've got a ten pound bag of beef bones in the freezer I've been wanting to make into stock. I will do as you say next time I make gravy. Do you like to add onions and etc when you make your stock?

I am glad you enjoyed. One thing I like about making my own is how cheap it is compared to jarred. Not to say I have never had a good jarred sauce, because they are out there too.

>Do you like to add onions and etc when you make your stock?

Nope. I like to make plain old stock without any salt or additions so that it doesn't interfere with anything I add it to.

The only exception is that I'll use things that come out of my smoker, if I can, to make a stock. I'll smoke a couple chickens and use the backs and the winglets to make a stock, and holy shit is that stuff good! I just did a chicken and andoille sausage gumbo using that smoked chicken sauce, and it was the bomb.

I make this too but I usually throw in ribs/neckbones/something else bony for muh flavor

you're making me miss my mom's cooking