NEW YORK (TheStreet) — A few weeks back, I live tweeted my Sunday adventure of making homemade pasta sauce. Surprisingly, quite a few people appreciated the effort. The process inspired some to take on weekend culinary endeavors of their own. Others requested my recipe.
The other day I finally got around to posting it on
. It’s a step-by-step account that leaves room to improvise (includes photos).
I use basic ingredients. No major bells and whistles. It’s the little things that count with my (mother’s) sauce. Like giving each step the proper time to stew. Using fresh herbs. And, most importantly, allowing the juices of the meats to flavor the sauce. As such, I simply do not need to include what seems to be, annoyingly, the second most beloved ingredient in North America — garlic. (Bacon, of course, being the first).
Like any other Italian American, I would be mindlessly infatuated with garlic if it weren’t for my odd family history. I have an uncle and a grandfather, who, at various times of their lives, swore off garlic. They binged on either loving or hating the stuff, more often than not, hating it. Out of deference to them, my mother frequently eliminated garlic from her cooking.
I didn’t miss it then. I don’t miss it now.
As somebody who has dabbled deep in South Indian vegetarian cooking — cut from Ayurvedic cloth — I have an appreciation for wide-ranging and powerful, but not overpowering flavor. In Ayurveda, you do not cook with garlic or onions. Rather you use asafoetida powder, also know as hing, in its place. This stuff “stinks,” but it’s not nearly as offensive to the senses as the equivalent to garlic in typical Indian cooking — chili powder.
Hing is a bit like cannabis. Strong smelling at introduction, but the stench fades fast, still allowing for meaningful and lasting impact.
Walk down a street where there’s an Indian restaurant nearby and you’re smacked in the face with the smell of chili powder. It’s appalling and repugnant really. (Though I must note this does not happen on the approach to my favorite Indian restaurants — Ayurveda Cafe in Manhattan at 94th and Amsterdam and Govinda’s at Venice and Watseka in Culver City, Calif.).
North Beach in San Francisco would be the perfect neighborhood if it weren’t for The Stinking Rose. That’s a garlic-focused restaurant that breaks nose pollution laws along the stretch of Columbus Avenue where it sits. The disgusting stink of garlic gets many times worse at sporting events that sell garlic fries in the corridors. I’ll never forget sitting through a preseason hockey game at the Oakland Coliseum with the odor of garlic hanging in the air.
This characteristic of garlic carries over to how it makes food taste.
Typically . . . like garlic.
As with chili powder, garlic is a bully. Few chefs — amateur or professional — I have run into put garlic in its proper place. Like bacon, it’s all about how much you can use. How many cloves can you smash with the backend of an expensive knife to hide the fact that you’ve got nothing else in your culinary arsenal?
That’s the beauty of Italian cooking
without
garlic. Or Indian without garlic, onions and, more important, copious amounts of chili powder. The supporting casts — basil, oregano, ginger, coriander, cumin, etc. — work better together, in proper servings, as a means to a tasty end. They also help you showcase whatever real talent you have as a cook.
Eliminate garlic or chili powder from the mix and now you have to actually do something.
There’s an Italian restaurant I frequent several times a month near my house. I love the place despite its routine of leaving huge pieces of garlic in your food. They do this on purpose for reasons that can’t be anything but inane. I simply ask for no or light garlic. Problem solved. There’s just something wrong with chunks of this stuff floating in your sauce.
Apparently, garlic has health benefits. But that’s no excuse. The ensembles I use to take the place of garlic (or chili powder in Indian food) do as much, if not more, for your health. And they provide greater pleasure while your cooking, when you eating and after the fact.
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Written by Rocco Pendola in Santa Monica, Calif.
Rocco Pendola is a columnist and
TheStreet’s
Director of Social Media. Pendola makes frequent appearances on national television networks such as
CNN
and
CNBC
as well as
TheStreet TV
. Whenever possible, Pendola uses hockey, Springsteen or Southern California references in his work. He lives in Santa Monica.