Ragù with rigatoni v2.0

In our last post I had talked about the ragù with rigatoni I'd made with beef instead of lamb.  I recently tried making it again with some of our modifications.  The results were a mixed bag of success: not quite as tasty, but some of the new techniques can be incorporated into the next iteration.

• We stuck with beef, mostly because in this area, it's easier to buy beef than lamb.
• I wanted to try making this with an Italian wine rather than a French wine.  Thanks to Wines and More Rhode Island (right next to Whole Foods!), we got a wine from the Campania region.  I actually ended up liking the French wine better, both on its own and in the dish (but see the caveat in the next point), though I do believe that we need a bigger sample size on this one.  The Italian red we used was a little more dry than the Rhône wine we'd gotten the first time.
• Instead of using the 1 cup of canned whole tomatoes + 1 cup of the juices, I used a 14 oz. can of diced tomatoes.  This was definitely not a solution.  The whole tomatoes are not canned in additional tomato juice; it's just whatever juices come from the tomatoes themselves.  Diced tomatoes, I have learned, are canned with additional juice added, so the ragù was much more acidic than version 1.0.  This made the dish overly tomato-y and combined with the wine we used, it didn't seem quite as complex of a flavour as the first ragù we made.  Most of the spices were drowned out.
• The recipe called for a cup and a half of chicken stock, which I had felt was too much, so for this iteration I reduced it to 1 cup.  Unfortunately, my ill-fated decision to use the diced tomatoes meant that there was still way too much liquid in the pot; I still had to boil the sauce uncovered for about 45 minutes to get it to reduce a bit.
• I greatly reduced the cumin and threw in a pinch of nutmeg along with a bay leaf, but as noted previously, the final dish was mostly a tomato sauce with some beef in it and practically no spices.  Next time I'll keep the proportions I used for this attempt.

So, I suppose this is what learning to cook is all about, right?  Trial and error, modifying the recipe a bit, then refining it some more?  That's what I keep telling myself, at least.

The fantastic thing about cooking with wine?  You can drink while cooking.

The Dinnertime Survival Cookbook (2013), p. 148-149

Writeup background noise: Mike and Mike simulcast on ESPN2.