Yesterday we had pasta for dinner. So far, this is nothing out of the ordinary, but let me elaborate on two aspects of this dinner. 1. I made my own sauce from scratch and 2. we put the wine in a blender.
1. Usually when I make pasta, I cook a few vegetables and meat in a frying pan then add some bottled sauce at the end. It is often good, but there is something off-putting about loving cooking vegetables and meat and then dumping a bunch of store-bought sauce on it. So, I decided to try to make my own sauce from scratch.
I decided to make bolognese (or ragu) sauce. It took about an hour or so of work and then three hours of simmering. It was all quite worth it. I thought it was probably the best past sauce I have ever made (I have been cooking pasta pretty frequently for the past year and a half, so there have been many competitors). It was a quite simple sauce, but very flavorful and very fresh tasting. It was straight-up ace. The experience also showed me how easy it is to make a good pasta sauce. So, I will soon be making this again and trying other sauce recipes.
2. We put the red wine in the blender. My brother, Chris, told me about this over the Christmas break. Believe me when I say this, putting wine in the blender is a serious game-changer. Red wine, especially cheap red wine, usually contains a lot of tannins, which is the thing in red wine that makes your mouth pucker up and feel kind of weird and dry. As I understand it, in fancy old wine, the tannins naturally fade away and the wine tastes smoother. The same thing happens when you decant wine and let it “open up” in the air: the tannins break down and the wine is smoother and more enjoyable.
Well, as it happens, putting wine in the blender for 15 or 20 seconds has the same effect. I put about half the wine in the blender and blended it for a bit. We then tried the unblended dep(convience store)-bought cheap wine. As per usual, it was okay but not very good, and I definitely felt the usual dry taste afterwards. Then, we tried the blended wine. I cannot stress this enough: THIS IS A SERIOUS GAME-CHANGER. It tasted much smoother and overall better. You must try this. Obviously, don’t use nice, expensive wine, but buy a cheap bottle of wine, put half of it in the blender and then taste the unblended and compare it to the blended. No matter how little you may think you know about wine, you will definitely taste the difference and everything will be different in your life. Needless to say, from now on, all the cheap wine I drink will be put in the blender.
Ace.