Sauced!

Recently I picked up a couple of pounds of pork neck bones from my girl Ami over at Breakneck Acres Farm.  Are you familiar with Breakneck Acres? If not, you better recognize!

They organically grow their own grains and mill them for flour and corn meal and chicken feed. And let me say that their polenta/grits are top notch. For real. Delicious. They grow organic produce and they’re also in the meat business and their meat is what I like best about them.

Pork, beef, chicken, eggs. And they have a really rad way of housing their layers. Check out their free range rover. Bitchin’. Their farm is inspirational, their products are kick ass, and they’re just really good people. You should check them out at the Haymaker Farmers’ Market or at their Farm Stand (Wednesdays).

So anyways, pork neck bones. If you’re familiar with the Sopranos or old school Italian Sunday gravy you know about neck bones.

I didn’t really follow a recipe but if you like recipes there is a Sopranos cookbook. And of course there is always Lidia Bastinach.

First things first. The tomatoes.

I roasted my tomatoes in a big roasting pan. Just drizzled them with a little olive oil and roasted them till they got a little brown. There was a lot of liquid but still plenty of substance.

I also roasted my neck bones.

I smeared them with a little tomato paste and I roasted them in a high heat oven until they were brown and caramelized.

I removed them from the dutch ovens to cool and then I sauteed some leeks and garlic in the same pots.

My assistant assisting.

We deglazed the pots with a little stock and were sure to scrape up all the browned bits stuck to the bottom of the pots. Then we took them off the heat.

We put the tomatoes through the food mill and added the sauce to the leeks/garlic/stock/brown bits.

I spiced up the sauce with plenty of fresh basil and my own dried oregano. I also added a couple cups of water and a small can of tomato paste to each pot.

This is a lot of sauce!

Then we added the roasted neck bones back to the sauce.

I put lids on the dutch ovens and cooked the sauce overnight in a 200 degree oven. (All three wouldn’t fit in my oven so I did the small pot the next day). When we woke up the next morning the whole house smelled AWESOME!

I removed the bones, plucked the meat off, and added it back to the sauce. Then, one pot at a time, I got the sauce on the stove top and brought it to a boil.

Since the sauce has meat and other low acid ingredients it had to be pressure canned. Some people are intimidated by pressure canning. It’s really not that big of a deal. And plus, it’s the only way to can delicious stuff like this sauce and since my freezer has about 120lbs of fruit in it there is no room for sauce!

The rule is hot liquid/ hot jars. I sterilized my jars by running them through the dishwasher. And then I poured boiling water oven them so they were nice and hot.

I ladled in the hot sauce.

I wiped the tops, added the lids and bands, and got it in the pressure canner.

I canned the quarts for 70 minutes and the pints for 60 minutes. I have canned 4 batches of this sauce and total yield was 8 quarts and 8 pints.

This sauce is killer. Granted it took some work but anything that is worth anything at all takes some hard work. And this was totally worth it.

Saturday at the market I picked up a couple bundles of fresh pappardelle from Ohio City Pasta and then I swung by Dumas for some hot sausage on my way home. We took my sauce, the pasta, the sausage, and some peppers from the garden over to a friend’s house and we gorged on pasta and stuffed peppers. Delicious!

If you have some free time, tomatoes, and some neck bones I suggest you give this a try.