RIVERHAus RECIPEs

(about 3 dozen) Prep: 15 min;  Inactive: 2 hr;  Cook: 15 min

Ingredients

• 1 1/2 cups lukewarm water

• 1/2 cup granulated sugar

• 1 envelope active dry yeast

• 2 eggs, slightly beaten

• 1 1/4 teaspoons salt

• 1 cup evaporated milk

• 7 cups bread flour

• 1/4 cup shortening

• Nonstick spray

• Oil, for deep-frying

• 3 cups confectioners' sugar

Directions

• Mix water, sugar, and yeast in a large bowl and let sit for 10 minutes.

• In another bowl, beat the eggs, salt and evaporated milk together. Mix egg mixture to the yeast mixture. In a separate bowl, measure out the bread flour. Add 3 cups of the flour to the yeast mixture and stir to combine. Add the shortening and continue to stir while adding the remaining flour. Remove dough from the bowl, place onto a lightly floured surface and knead until smooth. Spray a large bowl with nonstick spray. Put dough into the bowl and cover with plastic wrap or a towel. Let rise in a warm place for at least 2 hours.

• Preheat oil in a deep-fryer to 350 degrees F.

• Add the confectioners' sugar to a paper or plastic bag and set aside.

• Roll the dough out to about 1/4-inch thickness and cut into 1-inch squares. Deep-fry, flipping constantly, until they become a golden color. After beignets are fried, drain them for a few seconds on paper towels, and then toss them into the bag of confectioners' sugar. Hold bag closed and shake to coat evenly.

Ingredients

1 pound breakfast sausage, hot or mild

1/3 cup all-purpose flour 

3 to 4 cups whole milk, more to taste 

1/2 teaspoon seasoned salt 

2 teaspoons freshly ground black pepper, more to taste 

Biscuits, warmed, for serving

Directions

Pasta alla genovese…at its core this dish is a beef braise that uses the juice of a massive number of onions as the braising liquid. It's a brilliant little recipe that sounds like it's from Genoa, but it's actually from Naples, 

Ingredients

•  1 1/2 Lbs of Short Rib or Chuck

• 4 Lbs of Onions, Sliced

• 1 Carrot, Diced

• 2 Celery Stalks, Diced

• 2-3 Tablespoons Olive Oil

• 2 Cups of White Wine

• 1 1/2 Tablespoons, Tomato Paste

• 1/2 Pint of Cherry Tomatoes

• 6-8 Fresh Basil Leaves

• 1 Bay leaf

• 1/2 Cup of Pecorino Romano, Grated

• 1/2 Cup of Parmigiano Reggiano, Grated

• 1 Lb of Cut Ziti

DIRECTIONS

Prep the Vegetables:

1. Chop the ends off the onions, keeping the root end intact. Slice the onions in half and remove the skins.

2. Using a mandolin over a bowl, slice the onions as thinly as you can. You could use a knife and cut them by hand, but the thinner and more uniform the onions are, the creamier this sauce will become.

3. Then dice the celery and carrot into as small a dice as you can. Just like the onions, we want all these things to melt into the sauce. If you cut them thicker, that's okay, it will simply result in a chunkier sauce in the end.

4. Cut the cherry tomatoes in half.

5. Blend the two cheeses.

Making The Sauce:

6. Pat the beef dry and season well on all sides with salt.

7. In a Dutch oven or heavy-bottomed pot, preheat on high and once hot, add enough olive oil to coat the bottom of the pan, then add the beef to brown. If you’re making a larger amount of sauce, sear in batches.

8. Brown the beef on all sides well. Once seared, remove from the pot and add the carrots, celery, and a little handful of the sliced onions to the oil, turn the heat up to medium-high, and sauté the vegetables until they begin to brown. As they release their moisture, it should deglaze that brown bits off the bottom of the pan, which I want to build back up again.

9. After the vegetables begin to brown around the edges, add about 1 1/2 tablespoons of that tomato paste and get the stirred in and coating the vegetables. Tomato paste is not traditional, but I think it adds a nice richness to balance the sweetness and adds great color. Then we get the beef back into the pot, stir everything together, and once we see the pot start to get brown again, then we can deglaze the pot with about 2 cups of the white wine. Then we want to reduce that wine by at least half. Once you see the white has thickened, add a bay leaf, then add that mountain of onions directly over the pot. Season the onions with a decent amount of salt, then stir 'em up as best you can, then add in the cherry tomatoes, hit those with some salt, and then pack those onions in almost like you’re burying the meat, and then put a lid on.

10. Before you set a time, let everything steam for a few minutes, then check and stir the onions up a bit as they collapse, and then put the lid back on for another few minutes. Give it one more stir, set the flame down to low heat, and then we can set a time for 2 hours, stirring about once every 30 minutes.

11. And this is after 2 hours, the onions have completely collapsed and given off all their onion juice. That is now the braising liquid for the beef.

12. Now we enter the second phase of this cooking process, which is cooking with the lid off. We have all this liquid in the pot, and we want to reduce that down and concentrate the flavor and thicken the sauce to make it suitable for marrying with pasta. Cook for another two hours at least, on low, staring occasionally until the meat fully breaks down, the sauce has deepened in color, and has thickened. If at any point the sauce dries out too much, feed it a little water at a time to keep it wet. We don’t want it too dry. Taste for seasoning and adjust if needed. After 4 total hours of cooking (at a minimum), the sauce is ready to serve.

13. Next, in a pot of salted boiling water, cook the ziti. The box says 9 minutes to al dente, so I cook the pasta for 7 1/2 minutes in the water before transferring the pasta to the sauce and finishing it in the sauce pot. While it cooks, get a pan or saucier on the stove and add about a cup of the sauce to the pan to start simmering, then add a knob of butter and fresh basil to the sauce and stir it together until the butter melts into the sauce.

14. After 7 1/2 minutes, transfer the pasta to the sauce with a little of that starchy pasta water and stir to marry the two, adding pasta water as needed to adjust the consistency. We will be adding grated cheese to the sauce, so we need enough moisture for that cheese to melt into. Once the pasta is al dente, turn off the heat, allow the pasta to cool for a second, and then add the cheese, stirring vigorously to get the cheese melted into the sauce.

15. Get it into a bowl, ensuring you have plenty of the sauce running throughout the pasta, and then finish with a healthy sprinkle of the cheese. Take a bite and you’ll see that despite using such a large amount of sweet onions and cooking them way down, it’s not too sweet. Because of how we treated the sauce and the balance we added, the flavor is this mellow, smooth sweetness that also still maintains its savoriness, and then you’re left with the subtle, satisfying aftertaste that lingers in your mouth, forcing you to take bite after bite.

How to make a modern Sunday sauce that's better than your grandma's but will also make her proud. Rigatoni with Sunday sauce, ricotta meatballs, Italian sausage, and braised short ribs.  

Ingredients

• 6 Lbs Whole Peeled Tomatoes

• 4-6 Hot Italian Sausages

• 10-12 Italian Meatballs

• 4-6 English Cut or Boneless Short Ribs

• 1 Lb of Mezze Rigatoni

• A Package of Basil

• Plenty of Parmigiano

• 1/2 Cup of whipped Ricotta

Sauce

• 6lbs Whole Peeled Plum Tomatoes, Good Quality

• 6 cloves of Garlic, thinly sliced

• Fresh Basil

• 1/4-1/2 cup of olive oil

• Salt

DIRECTIONS

Start the Sauce First

1. Slice the garlic thinly. Puree the tomatoes in a food mill or by pulsing in a blender on low. Fill the cans with water to clean them out, and then pour the water into the sauce to thin it so that it can last the hours of cooking necessary to cook the meats.

2. In a large pot over medium heat, add the olive oil, enough to coat the bottom of the pan, then immediately add the garlic and basil to the oil and slowly bring it up to temperature to infuse the oil with the garlic and basil flavor. The oil is the vehicle to transfer all that flavor to the tomatoes. Once the garlic starts to brown, add the pureed tomatoes. Bring the sauce up to a simmer while you prepare the short rib.

3. First meat to add is the short rib (4-5 hours of cook time, preferably covered)

4. While the sauce is coming up to temp in a separate pan on medium to medium-high heat, add some olive oil and season the short ribs on all sides, and sear the meat until it’s nicely browned on all sides. Then transfer the beef to the sauce. Drain the fat in the pan and then deglaze with a bit of white wine or water, and then transfer the deglazed bits to the sauce. The short ribs need at least 4-5 hours of cooking head start to be tender when all said and done. I usually cook this uncovered, but I recommend covering the pot at this time to help the beef break down and to prevent the sauce from reducing too much, too fast.

5. The next Meat is the Sausage (1 hour)

6. After the short ribs have cooked for 4-5 hours and are starting to become tender, we can add the next meat, which is the sausage. Just like the short ribs, we want to sear the sausages on all sides and then, once nicely browned, add them to the pot of sauce, drain the excess oil, deglaze the pan with wine or water, and then pour that into the sauce. We can now cook the sausages with the short rib for another 1 hour, uncovered now to help the sauce start to reduce to the correct consistency. While the sausage cooks, we can begin to make our meatballs.

7. For the meatballs, bring them over to the stove to start frying them, and then put them in the sauce. To fry, use a large, wide-bottom pan and add a healthy amount of olive oil and get that up to a frying temp. Before you fry the meatballs, fry the basil, toss in the hot oil, and fry until the leaves start to turn dark green. As soon as you see that, get them out of the oil, and they will crisp up. Then brown the meatballs as best you can over medium heat, and then add them to the sauce. Cook the meatballs in the sauce for about 1 hour.

8. If at any point the sauce is beginning to thicken too much before the meats are finished cooking, then simply use water to thin the sauce back out to buy yourself more time. You’re gonna have to keep stirring the sauce with a flat-bottomed spoon or else as the sauce thickens it will catch to the bottom of the pan and potentially burn. These are the two main things to consider as the sauce and the meats cook.

9. Once the meatballs are in the sauce and have been cooking for an hour, the short ribs should now be fork tender, and the sauce should be thick enough to coat the meat. Check the sauce for seasoning and make any adjustments, and at this point, the meatballs and sausage will be cooked. The only variable is the short ribs. If at this point the short ribs are not yet fork-tender, I’d remove the meatballs and sausages and hold them warm in my oven with some sauce while I allow the short ribs to continue cooking with the cover on. Once the Short ribs are sufficiently tender, add the meat back to the sauce and get a pot of water salted and up to a boil to finish the meal.

10. I like mezze rigatoni for this dish. It is al dente after 12 minutes, so I pull the pasta at 10 minutes and finish cooking the pasta in a separate pan with sauce until it's perfectly al dente and the sauce clings to the pasta.

11. Then plate the pasta in a big bowl, with some sauce on top. Then pipe some dots of the whipped ricotta along the top, followed by a generous amount of Parmigiano cheese, and then the crumbled up fried basil leaves. Plate the meats in a separate bowl with the same garnishes. Congrats, you just made Nonna proud.