Bob Stevenson’s Spaghetti Sauce

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Submitted by Mary Ciambelli and Bill Wasinski, who consider this “the best spaghetti sauce known to humans”  Thanks to Bob for allowing them to share it!

  • A few cloves of garlic, diced
  • A good size yellow onion, diced
  • 1.5-2 pounds of ground meat. Italian sausage (sweet or spicy or mixed); bison, lean ground beef or some combination of all.
  • Italian seasoning, two palmfuls.
  • Bay Leaves 3 or 4. Pull them out before eating but leave them in for the leftovers.
  • Red Wine 2-3 oz. (too much makes it bitter, too little you don’t get the flavor)
  • 1 heaping tablespoon of sugar
  • Olive oil to brown the garlic and onions.
  • One big can and one small can of tomato paste. Flavor + Sweetness
  • One big can of tomato sauce.
  • One big can of diced or crushed tomatoes (Better yet, buy canned whole tomatoes and
  • Squish them in your hands and put that squished stuff in the sauce). Put the liquid from the can into the sauce.
  • One big can of water.
  • Never think about adding salt (plenty in the canned tomatoes)

Assembly

Open all of the cans and dump them into your stock pot. Place on low-simmer heat. Dump in the one can of water, Italian seasoning, bay leaves, sugar, and wine.

Stir.

Sautee the onions in olive oil until almost clear. Dump into the sauce including the residual olive oil.

Sautee the garlic in lots of olive oil so that it is all swimming. As soon as it starts to think about getting brown STOP and dump the oil and garlic into the sauce.

Brown the meat. Just let it get fairly gray. Dump off as much of the grease as you can.

Put the meat into the sauce after grease removal.

Cooking

Bring the sauce to the lowest boil possible. Once it begins to boil, you want it to be quite watery. Add water if needed at this step (may be just fine). Return to simmer.

The longer this simmers, the better it is (at least an hour but no matter how long it simmers its always better as leftovers. All day is good. Just keep putting in water if it gets too thick and cook it down again). This sauce keeps for at least a week in the refrigerator and can also be frozen. Never make a smaller batch.

Use pasta that holds a lot of sauce like penne or seashells. To live longer use whole wheat pasta.

Buon Appetito!

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