The 30-Minute Spaghetti I Make for People I Love

Hey, what's up? Today, I'm gonna show you guys my well-tested recipe for Midwestern mom spaghetti sauce. This recipe is super nostalgic. It is very high payoff and it is surprisingly easy. It only takes about 30 minutes start to finish and literally any home cook at any skill level can make it, no problem. To get started, I got a big pot of water here and I'm just gonna drop that down over high heat and let it come up to a boil while we make the sauce. Over here on my burner, I got a Dutch oven. Any kind of heavy bottom pot would work if you don't have a Dutch oven. And I've got it rolling over medium high heat and I'm gonna add in a long ziggy of olive oil, maybe about two tablespoons. Then I'm gonna add in one pound of 80-20 ground beef. 90-10 is also fine if you're watching calories. Then I'll add in eight ounces or 225 grams of Italian sausage. If you don't eat pork, you can skip this and sub in a little bit of extra ground beef. I like to add the Italian sausage though because it brings a little bit of a subtle, sweet anise flavor. It brings a little bit of spice and I think having two meats in here is just more flavorful than one. Now I'll hit this with a little bit of salt. Then jump in with one of the most important tools in my kitchen, which is a meat musher. And I'm just gonna smush this and do my best to break this meat down as small as humanly possible. That's probably gonna take about six to seven minutes of dedicated effort. But you really wanna put the time in. Honestly, any ground beef dish where you haven't taken the time to smush it down fine up front is gonna be less good. If you think back to the spaghetti sauce or the chili or the taco meat that your mom made when you were a kid, chances are she didn't spend a lot of time. She probably put a lot of love in. Let's just put that up front. Mom was trying her best. You know, it was after work or whatever. She only had a couple of minutes. She's pulling together dinner. God bless her. But she didn't put the work in smushing the meat and then you were left with these giant chunks that are a little bit sinewy. They're dry, they're really tough and they're just not pleasurable to eat at all. So you really just wanna make sure that you spend the first part of this recipe diligently smushing this into the smallest pieces you can. So I'm rolling this over about medium high but things are getting a little bit hot. So I'm gonna turn it down a bit. I just wanna brown it off gently while rendering the fat and making sure that I get it as crumbled down as humanly possible. After about five minutes or so, the meat's looking pretty good. We're at about a pea sized. Most people would call this good. Keep on cooking it for about two more minutes, smushing the entire time. We just really, really wanna avoid clods of beef. And that's looking pretty good. Pretty much every single large chunk now has gotten some attention. And we've also got a little bit of fond developing on the bottom of the pot. That's some bonus meat flavor that's gonna make this taste delish. So from here, I'm gonna add in 200 grams of medium chopped onion and 20 grams of minced garlic and then a nice strong pinch of salt. My heat's a little bit low. I'm gonna get it back up over a medium-ish and I'm just gonna stir and sweat the onions and garlic for about five to seven minutes or until the onions are softened, a little bit translucent and until the garlic is smelling a little bit roasty. Also, I added salt to the onions at this point for two reasons. One, is it's gonna draw out some moisture, which is gonna help deglaze that meaty fondue stuff that's on the bottom of the pan. And two, it just makes the onions cook faster. I don't know the scientific reason why that is. It just helps the onions break down a lot faster. Okay, at this point, the onions are looking translucent. They're nice and soft and we got some of the fondue bits off, but as we cook, it's continuing to get more and more glazed. That's great. That's tons of flavor, but it also can get away from us and we can get to the point where we're frying the beef and that dry stuff out and we don't want that. So we're gonna move kind of quick from this point forward. Next, I'm gonna add in 75 grams of tomato paste and then I'll just jump in real quick and sizzle that off to open up its flavor. And I'm just gonna cook it until it's got a little bit of a rusty red color. It should take maybe 90 seconds or so. I like to add tomato paste into sauces like this because it just ups the tomato intensity. It's almost like tomato bouillon. If you don't cook the tomato paste and you just add it in with the wet ingredients, it can be a little bit tinny, can have kind of a canned tomato flavor that I don't love. And cooking it in dry heat with fat like this just brings one more layer of flavor that's robust, interesting, and just a little bit more deep. That's looking good. Tomato paste is nice and rusty. We've got a little bit of a fondue situation building up that's getting a little bit dark. So I'm gonna add some water to deglaze that real quick. Don't be shy with this, guys. A lot of people think water is the enemy, like it's gonna dilute stuff too much, but especially when I'm cooking on camera and I'm talking, I'm not really looking at the burner that closely and the heat can get away from me and things can go a little bit further than I want them to. I'm sure some of you people have kids running around and you just like take your eye off the ball for a second. And if you get to a point where you've got a little bit of darkness on the bottom of the pot, don't keep going because that's gonna turn into real darkness over time. So just adding a little bit of water, it's no big deal. It's not gonna change the flavor at all. That water just helps get that dark stuff off the pot before it starts to burn. The onions are nice and translucent and the tomato paste's flavor has been opened up and it's nice and robust now. So I'm gonna move on and put in 28 ounces of nice tasting crushed tomatoes. What do I mean by nice tasting? Well, you should open up a can, take a big spoonful and be like, yum, that is palatable, I like that. It sounds kind of stupid, but you'd be surprised. A lot of canned tomato brands, especially the cheaper ones are sour and tinny and just not very delicious. And you really wouldn't wanna eat a spoonful on its own. I like Chento, these are about 3.99 a can, I think. And I also like Bianco Di Napoli a lot. I go out of my way to get one of these two brands. The crushed tomatoes are in, I'm gonna go over to the sink and fill this up about three quarters of the way. This is maybe two cups, two and a half. And I'll use my spoon to scrape around the edges here just to make sure that any fondue bits come up and are brought into the sauce. And once the water's stirred in, I'm just gonna turn this heat down to about medium low so that I can reduce it by 30% or so and cook the sauce so that everything comes together and gets really delicious and unified. Low heat is also important here because this gets really ploppy because it's pretty thick. And that means that it can make a mess pretty easily. It can go all over the place. Next, eight grams of sugar go in, then 15 grams of Better Than Bouillon beef base, then one gram each of chili flake and dried oregano. And if you're wondering why I put bouillon in a spaghetti sauce, it's just to make it taste more beefy. After all, this is a meat sauce. It would be good if it tasted as meaty as possible. If you don't have Better Than Bouillon, you can leave it out. It's gonna be delicious. From here, I'm gonna pop on a lid and maybe rip this up to medium heat. The lid's pretty essential because that's gonna keep the ploppiness contained while allowing evaporation. And in total, we wanna reduce this by about 30 to 40%. Also, if you're wondering, yes, you can easily scale this up to two times batch if you wanna make a bunch of spaghetti sauce at once and have a big dinner of spaghetti and then freeze a bunch of sauce so you can have spaghetti in the future. As long as you've got a pot that's about six quarts, just two times everything in the recipe and you're gonna be good to go. I'm gonna cook this for about 20 minutes, but I'm gonna stir it every five, scraping up the bottom just to make sure that the tomato stuff isn't getting stuck because that can get scorched and burnt. We're about halfway reduced at this point. You can see it leaves a trail, but it's still a little wet looking, a little sloppy. It's not gonna make for the best spaghetti experience. So we're gonna cook this for another 10 to 12 minutes, basically however long it takes to cook pasta. So over here, I've got a big pot of ripping water and I'm just gonna salt that heavily. I'm gonna add in a pound's worth of spaghetti and cook it per package instructions. Another thing I wanna mention actually is that this was an idea that Alex gave me and I think it's a great idea. If you wanna do a make-ahead version of this sauce, you can bring it up to the point where it's cooked down a little bit and then flip it into a slow cooker or a crock pot and then just let it kind of bubble away until you need it later on. And after about 20 minutes of cooking down, the sauce is looking really, really good. It's reduced to the point where when I pass my spatula through it, it leaves a sturdy trail that kind of sticks around. Once this cools down a tiny bit and is sitting on top of pasta, it's gonna have the perfect viscosity. It's gonna kind of grip things and it's gonna have that thickness and concentrated flavor that you're looking for. Now, I'm gonna finish this sauce by adding in 10 grams of chopped fresh basil. And if you're wondering if you can use dried basil instead, totally, you can, but just know that it's not gonna be the same. It brings this herbal freshness. It brings this sweet flavor. Oh man, I can smell the basil. It's so good. So I'm gonna kill the heat now and do a very important step, which is to taste this for seasoning. We added some salt with the beef and sausage and with the onions, and it might need a little bit more. I say this all the time in my videos, you guys, but salt level is super important. You can put all the work in of cooking a dish properly, get the onions cooked right, get the size of the meat broken down into the perfect little particle. And if there's not enough salt, it's gonna be bland, and you're gonna be like, what happened? It's not precise, but it's very hard for me to tell you this dish needs 11 grams of salt because the sausage is gonna have some salt in it. The canned tomatoes, they don't have salt, but the acidity of that is gonna impact your perception of the salt. How much you cook everything is gonna impact how you perceive the salt. So you're always gonna need a different amount. Mm, it's very nostalgic. It reminds me of Prego or something like that, but everything's turned up to 11. Beautiful sweetness, but it's not sugary. The onions are nice and melty. It's very meaty too from that extra bouillon. Also, as this sits, it's gonna thicken up just a little bit more, which I think is ideal. I really don't want a loose sauce here because that's gonna make for a soupy bowl of spaghetti that's sloppy and not very delicious. When it's thick, it's more concentrated and it grips the noodles a lot better. Speaking of noodles, I'm not a huge al dente guy. I know a lot of chefs are like al dente or nothing, dude. That's not me. I like to have a nice bounce. I like to have life and a little bit of elasticity. So I cook it just a little bit past al dente and personally, I think that's perfect. So I'm gonna take this over to the sink, drain off the boiling water. You really wanna make sure you get as much water off this as you possibly can because any excessive pasta water is just gonna end up in the bowl and watering down the sauce. We've all been to an Italian restaurant where you get spaghetti and your sauce is looking good, there's noodles, and then around the edges of the bowl, there's basically orange water. That's a huge bummer. I drained these super, super well and I'm gonna let them steam off for a minute and I'm gonna add in a three or four second ziggy of olive oil to keep these from sticking to each other and give it at least three minutes to chill out and reabsorb any excessive water. It's just gonna make the overall eating experience so much better. Then to plate this up, I'm gonna swirl up a big portion of noodles with some tongs while giving it a little twirl so I can have a pile. Then three to four large ladles full of my nicely reduced spaghetti sauce. Yeah, you can tell it's nice and thick. That's gonna grip the noodles super well. And then this is really important. The final step here is gonna be to add a bunch of Parmesan cheese. When I grew up, and I'm sure you guys are the same way, you use that Kraft shaker, like the cheese dust. When it comes to this, I like to use real deal Parmesan. This is 24 month or maybe 18 month that I got from Whole Foods that's been grated. And the thing that I like about it is that it's gravelly, like it has a chunkier texture so it doesn't melt right into the sauce. It kind of stays differentiated. And then finally, the last step, which is optional, is to kind of drizzle a little nice tasting olive oil on top. That's mom's spaghetti right there, bro. I'm so hyped on this, truly. Mm. First of all, that olive oil that we added right at the end, that's a pro move. That's the first thing you get when you get a slurp. It's almost like eating fresh bread at a restaurant when you're dipping it in olive oil because there's a bunch of parm. The sauce though is so meaty. Like it has lots of meat flavor. The basil is really beautiful too. It brings this beautiful, herbaceous quality. It's a little bit sweet. There's tons of delicious Parmesan. It's nutty and it's rich and fatty in a way that the cheaper stuff isn't. Oh my God. I love this recipe. You guys should make it. The full recipe will be down in the description and it will also be over on the blog over at brianlagershrim.com. Thanks for being here. I'll see you in the next video. Mm.