Strawberry Ragu
The Guardian ran a feature yesterday featuring 20, ostensibly, off-the-wall tips from a number of chefs to help inspire home cooks whose creative juices have been tapped dry during the last year and a half. I won’t go into much more detail other than to say they are (mostly) brilliant and (mostly) make a lot of sense, even if there are some tragically reductive and snarky comments below the line. You should read it.
Amongst them were a couple submitted by me: dishes and techniques that have featured on the menu at Vanderlyle and have proven to be immensely popular. One is more of a sneaky seasoning hack that we often use to add a smokey, savoury, meaty accent to dishes, rather than an actual recipe and is as simple as using lapsang souchong tea as an infusion for sauces and reductions.
The other is a bona fide recipe which, whilst sounding unusual, makes perfect sense.
I first learned of strawberry ragu after watching an episode of The Mind of a Chef, a wonderful PBS series that aired in the US and featured the work of several talented and (to me) highly inspirational chefs. A particular joy was watching eight episodes of the majestic David Kinch share his thoughts, wisdom and recipes with the camera. During one section he cooks alongside Jeremy Fox, the former head chef of Kinch’s LA-based restaurant Manresa.
As well as a recipe for homemade blood sausage, Fox also demonstrated his technique for making a slow-cooked, rich and savoury sauce with strawberries as the main ingredient, something that certainly ticked a lot of boxes for me. I immediately did a little more research and was delighted to learn he had written a book that featured only vegetarian dishes. On Vegetables became a defining cookbook for us at the restaurant during our first year, a time when we were finding our feet and working hard to figure out how to characterise ourselves and our style of cooking. And whilst we never lifted entire dishes from those pages, we did make heavy use (and still do) of a large number of the techniques Fox describes.
By the time summer rolled round in 2019, we’d informally committed to maintaining the plant-based menu we had opened with (in March of the same year), and resolved to see if we could cook for a full 12 months without putting any meat or fish on the menu. I suppose this was the beginning of a desire to try to emulate the savoury and deeply satisfying flavour of meat based cuisine, whilst only using plants.
Strawberries were in rich supply that year and one benefit of ordering wholesale is being able to request ‘class two’ produce, which may not be as pretty but often has the benefit of being overripe and in many cases, tastier, as well as considerably cheaper.
The process of making strawberry ragu (we have changed Fox’s recipe slightly, and also changed the name - the finished product seemed to behave in a manner much more similar to a ragu, rather than a soffrito) is a slow one: perhaps six or seven hours of languid cooking and the occasional stir for the quantities we make it in, not to mention the time spent peeling and dicing the carrot, celery and onion for the base (itself, technically a soffrito - or mirepoix).
But it is time well spent. It’s an item we tend to prepare over a couple of days, converting the raw vegetables into tiny dice one afternoon so that we can begin the cooking process early in the morning, ensuring it will definitely be ready in time for service. Once the chopping is done, it’s a hands-off waiting game. I hesitate to make this comparison but it is a similar experience to making jam - the occasional stir (and one or two potential pan transfers if the sauce begins to catch), a small taste every now and then to assess doneness and seasoning but very little else.
The resultant sauce is dark. Darker than may be expected. A slow, rich caramelisation of the sugars in the vegetables and strawberries results in a boldly savoury ragu that offers little, if any, hint to its fruitful origins. It could, if you wanted, be finished with a couple of handfuls of fresh basil (something my wife learned in Italy is that we should all use lots more basil than we do - great fistfuls can do magical things to a slow-cooked tomato sauce, be bold) or simply stirred through pasta and finished with a cloud of finely grated Parmesan or Pecorino, which - with its salty kick and lactic, ovine tang - makes for a wonderful pairing.
As a tortelloni filling it works perfectly, dressed with little more than verdant green olive oil and more of the same cheese. We’ve served it as a canape, topping a tiny sourdough crumpet with a little fresh ricotta and dill and have even been as brave as to use it in a lasagne, with hispi cabbage subbing in for sheets of pasta and topped with a rich bechamel sauce flavoured with yeast, something that wasn’t exactly a success, but nor was it an abject failure - it remains a work in progress. Cabbage, strawberry and yeast lasagne: I'll write about it someday (perhaps one for subscribers only).
Superficially, amongst the closed-minded, the notion of strawberry ragu sparks derision (as it did from several commenters in response to the Guardian article). To some people, the very idea of adding fruit to a savoury preparation is an illogical, culinary misnomer, despite the many, many current and historical examples of it being not just palatable but delicious. This gastro-ethnocenticism drives me wild at the best of times, but today is not the day for that particular argument. Instead, I’ll implore the more open-minded of you, now that strawberries are in abundance, to give it a go. Maybe follow it with some olive oil ice cream for dessert.
Recipe
125g each of finely diced carrot, celery, onion and fennel
240ml extra virgin olive oil
135g pine nuts
500g hulled strawberries
Salt (optional pepper)
Cook the diced vegetables and pine nuts in the olive oil in a large, heavy-based pan or casserole over a very low heat for about an hour. Season judiciously. Stir as and when is necessary to stop the vegetables from catching. They will at first soften, then shrink, then slowly begin to caramelise.
Add the strawberries, squeezing them into the pan with bare hands. Season again, stir and cook for a further two and a half to three hours. It’s ready when the sauce is dark and the oil swims merrily in pools on top (watch the video, you’ll see exactly what I mean). It will keep for at least a week in the fridge.
Notes
The recipe is not prescriptive, it’s more of an idea than an exact set of instructions. Don’t fret too much about exact quantities. One part soffritto to two parts strawberry is the rough ratio. Even if you dislike fennel, consider adding it. Its distinct aniseed quality fades during the cooking time.
Don’t skimp on the olive oil.
Be patient.
Season little and often throughout the cooking process. Don’t forget to taste and take care not to overseason. The presence of salt will intensify as the sauce cooks down and the water in the strawberries evaporates.
If pine nuts seem extravagant, use sunflower seeds instead. Or pumpkin seeds. Or something else. Whatever takes your fancy.
Ok, this looks very interesting. What temperature are you keeping the olive oil at? And, you are referring to a video, just above the notes. What video is that?