Pappardelle With Tuscan Pork Ragù

Pappardelle, Tuscany, and ragù di cinghiale (wild boar sauce) are all linked together in my memory of my time living and cooking in Italy. Just thinking about wide, satiny, egg-rich pasta ribbons tossed in meaty, herby, Chianti-kissed sauce transports me back to Siena. I wish I could recreate this iconic dish exactly as I remember it, back home in the U.S., but I just don’t cross paths with any wild boar on my little island off of Cape Cod.

Making the pappardelle is manageable, even here in America. Use good eggs, plenty of yolks, knead the dough lovingly, roll it paper-thin, and use a sharp knife to cut the noodles. Check. But, making ragù di cinghiale without the cinghiale is a much more intimidating task. Could good ‘ol American pork work in a traditional Tuscan wild boar sauce? I set out to at least give it a whirl.

An Unexpected Substitute for Wild Boar

While my experiences in Tuscany with ragù di cinghiale revolve around the named star ingredient of wild boar, I knew that for this recipe I would need to substitute with a more widely available cut of pork. My instinct when I started my recipe testing was to use pork shoulder in place of wild boar. Since I knew I would be marinating the pork and slow-cooking it, I thought pork shoulder would perform well. When cooked slowly, the large amounts of connective tissue in the shoulder break down while the fat slowly renders, to create soft, shreds of pork fit for a spoonable sauce. I got a picnic shoulder and cooked the heck out of it, low and slow. The results were mixed. Some parts were really tender and delicious but others were dry and almost stringy. Also, using a larger sized shoulder cut was just too much meat for the final amount of sauce I wanted to make. The amount of pork in the sauce needed to perfectly cling to the pappardelle noodles without overwhelming the pasta.

在一个有趣的事件,有一个史诗般的出售on St. Louis–cut ribs at my local grocery store that caught my eye. Although I hadn’t envisioned using ribs for this project, the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. One rack of ribs was convenient from a purchasing perspective, plus I knew that a rib rack simmered and braised in an aromatic sauce for a long period of time would render shreddable meat, and a sauce well flavored from all of the rib bones, collagen, and connective tissue. I cut the rack into three equally sized sections so they would easily fit into a pot, then marinated and cooked them on the bone. The results were great! The pork was consistently tender and rich, and infused with the flavorful wine marinade. Most importantly, the rib meat broke down into perfectly-sized shreds that clung to the pappardelle when twirled on a fork.

When a Marinade Is More Than Just a Marinade

Almost all the Tuscan recipes I came across for ragù di cinghiale started off by marinating the wild boar overnight. This serves two purposes; it tenderizes the meat and tempers the gamey flavor of the boar. Applying this treatment to our supermarket rack of ribs might not be necessary, but it couldn’t hurt to try. I mixed garlic, juniper berries, black peppercorns, and bay leaves into the better part of a bottle of Tuscan red wine and let the pork soak in it overnight before I prepared my ragù.

I also experimented with adding different amounts of red wine in the marinade; while I wanted the final sauce to have an undeniably wine-forward flavor, I did not want it to taste astringent or sour. And, I certainly didn’t want to ask home cooks to open more than one bottle of wine for cooking. A little more than two cups cups of red wine relative to the quantity of pork was enough to coat the meat and develop robust flavor in the marinade without letting any go to waste.

Even with a moderate amount of wine in the marinade, it still seemed a shame to discard it the next day and use fresh wine for the braise (something many recipes do), especially once it is infused with all those great aromatic notes from the garlic and spices. Rather than pouring it down the drain, I strained the marinade and added that to the sauce to simmer the pork in. This developed great flavor and was a smart and efficient way to build flavor into my sauce.

Finding the Right Balance In the Final Sauce

The Tuscan boar ragù this recipe is based on often incorporates a few key herbs and spices, bay leaves, black peppercorns, and juniper among them. Bay leaves and black peppercorns are easy enough, and add a welcome complexity to the sauce. But why the juniper berries? They are a staple in Tuscan stews and meaty sauces. And as Max Falkowitz informs us in hisSpice Huntingstory, “It [juniper] tastes something like rosemary crossed with a berry. Its resinous-but-not-too-piney flavor is the perfect thing to cut through fat or otherwise overwhelmingly strong flavors. It's most at home with game, be it avian or mammal, as it subdues excessive gaminess and practically transports tasters to 4 a.m. hunting grounds.” Yeah, so maybe we do need these berries to do their magic and give this grocery store pork a pseudo-cinghiale vibe.

The final element of the sauce that I had to figure out was the tomato. The sauce should be both assertively meaty and wine-y, and when I first cooked a version of this ragù with a big 28-ounce can of crushed tomatoes, the flavors I had developed with the overnight wine marinade were overshadowed by the tinned tomatoes. After a long simmer, the tomatoes became thick and jammy–not what we want here. Swapping out half of the tomatoes for chicken broth resulted in a much more balanced sauce where the savory flavors of the pork, wine, and aromatics could shine.