Ragú Napoletano (Neapolitan-Style Italian Meat Sauce With Pork, Beef, and Sausage)

A couple of weeks back I spent a good deal of time developing a recipe for lasagna Napoletana, a lasagna stuffed with smoked cheese, sausage, meatballs, and a rich, meaty tomato sauce. That meat-packed tomato sauce is known as ragù Napoletano.

As I said in that recipe, the undisputed king of ragùs is ragù Bolognese. But if you were to pick a president and el tigre numero uno of the ragù world, it'd be ragù Napoletano, a meaty stew with big chunks of meat and sausages simmered until fall-apart tender in a rich tomato sauce. It's the precursor to the Italian-American Sunday gravy that we know here in the States: just add some meatballs, serve it with spaghetti, and you're there.

While the recipe I developed for that particular dish was based 100% on pork (as is traditional for the lasagna), I figured it'd be a short hop, skip and a jump to adapting the same technique to work with a combination of pork, beef, and sausage, to deliver a true ragù suitable for your Sunday table.

To make it, I start by searing large pieces of pork spareribs and beef chuck in a Dutch oven until well-browned, then add onions and garlic, followed by some red wine (it goes better with the beef in this version than the white I used in the pork-based version), some hand-crushed or pureed tomatoes, and some whole stems of basil. After that I park it in the oven for a good, slow cook (the oven produces more flavorful results than stovetop simmering due to the better browning the stew gets on its surface).

As it finishes off, I add some sausages in to cook through for about 30 minutes—sausages can overcook, and I prefer mine with a juicier texture instead of the mushy texture of long-cooked sausage. In Italy, it's common to find other meaty additions to this ragù, including various involtini (meat rolled around various stuffings like herbs and/or cheese), but that's a bit more work and hard to find premade in the States.

After you've put in the time, some really good olive oil, salt, and pepper are the only other things that this sauce needs to achieve pure and simple nirvana. That and a good pasta, that is.

While you can serve this ragù like an Italian-American Sunday gravy, in which the meat is left in the sauce and served on the pasta, it's more common in Italy to remove the meat from the sauce and serve it alongside the pasta or as a subsequent course.

Even better is when the sauce is cooked down further once the meat has been removed; that way you ensure you don't unnecessarily dry out the meat once it's ready, while still managing to further concentrate the sauce to a deep, dark, ruddy color with a flavor that's equally profound and rich. And please don't be put off by any fat that slicks this sauce's surface: That's a feature, not a but—exactly what is supposed to happen after so many hours of braising a large quantity of meat until it's meltingly tender.

The only downside of this dish is that eating it doesn't take nearly as long as making it!