Lamb Ragu with Gnocchi from scatch

Well I've been wanting to try a rich ragu for a while now and what better time than during the cold months of winter.  A ragu is basically a rich meat sauce made for pasta.  The meat is cooked in liquid for several hours until it is fork tender and has married into the sauce.  Some people make this in a roasting pan and put it in the oven.  For this recipe I used a stock pot and cooked it on the stove top.

I bought a boneless leg of lamb and cut away three pounds.

Next get your stock pot nice and hot, you're going to get a nice sear on the outside of your meat.  I coated the bottom of the pot with oil, I used canola because unlike olive, it has a relatively high smoking point.

You only want to cook the pieces of meat until they have browned, about 6-7 minutes on each side.  Once this is accomplished I removed the meat and put in the veg that I wanted.  In this case I used 2.5 red onions .5 sweet potato,  and 5 cloves garlic minced.  Saute these ingredients till tender and onions are translucent.  Then I added in some aromatics, a couple sprigs of rosemary and a few sage leaves and added the meat back in.

This recipe is sort of a culmination of several versions I was able to find on the internet and cookbooks.  Most of the recipe's called for carrot but I wanted to try it with the sweet potato instead to give it a little more starch and sweetness.  Also the aromatics are up to you, I also saw some recipe's that used basil which I think would taste great as well.

Next step add in the wine which acts like a braising liquid.  I used 2.5 cups red table wine and reduced that by half before adding the tomato's.  The tomato's are Contadina San Marzano whole canned tomato's.  To me (as well as many other people) San Marzano give a great rich and sweet taste.  I removed these from their cans, squeezed the whole tomato's in my hand, leaving the most of the juice in the can and measured out about 40 ounces.  Add these to the pot and let all ingredients simmer for several hours.  Basically what you're doing is letting all the water in your ingredients to escape via vapor (steam), what happens is that you are left with more solids in all your ingredients and more concentrated flavor as well as a thicker sauce.  Here is what the pot looked like after the first hour

And after another 2 - 2.5 hours.

You can see how the color has become nice and red and that all the liquid has considerably reduced.  Lets not forget that nice chunk of lamb that was unbelievably tender.

I served this over a bowl of gnocchi that I made from scratch.  Here is a picture of the end result.  More on how to make the gnocchi in the next post, until then!

You can see how much the color changed and got even darker after I married the sauce and gnocchi with some oil and butter in the fry pan.