Hi everybody! I’m Chef John McCormack with The Trois Estate. Now we’re going to show you how to put together the simple marinara. What I put down first is a good pan, big sauté pan. I want to get it nice and hot. I put a little oil in there, little butter to get it going. I’m going to add my onions that have little olive oil in them already. Kind of soak them a little bit. I want to get these nice and hot. You want to get your olive oil hot. Here everything wants to be warm. Remember a good method, procedure or technique starts off with a warm pan, warm olive oil, and then whatever you want to sauté. You want to make a good sizzle sound when it hits.
There we go, let us start off. We are going to add our garlic, that’s one of our good ingredients. Well let that sauté for just a few seconds. Now one thing when you’re cooking with garlic, you got to remember the good garlic flavor, it’s not when it is raw, and it’s when it’s over-cooked, because that's when it too bitter. You want to get it just when it’s nice. It's barely turning brown, but you only have a small window there, before its gets too brown, it starts to bitter on you. It's that time, when you really stop the cooking to keep it from bittering. So what you will do, add white wine, in this case, we’re going to add some red wine, and let us start. After we’ve stopped the cooking, we’re going to ahead and add some dried oregano, and crushed red peppers. Some basil, a pinch of good coarser salt and hit it with a nice good Madagascar black pepper.
Let this simmer, let it reduced by about a third. Then, as we reduce the valve, you want to add your tomatoes. And this is what I’ve talked about earlier. This is your blend of half red roasted tomatoes, and half red Roman tomatoes. Let that simmer, let it reduce, just a short while. Put everything together, everything incorporated. Let it do its thing. Now it’s at this point, where I go ahead also, and add my beef stock. This is what I’ve talked about earlier, you can add a demi-glace, which I have here at the restaurant, and that’s a real demi-glace that we have, or you can use beef stock. Any beef stock will do, one from your local grocery store is fine. A bouillon cube will do anything to give at a good beefy flavor to get your marinara. And of course with marinara is a tomato sauce with beef stop or cooked with beef bones.
Here’s a quick shot of the beef stock that we use. This is demi-glace. Actually it's about 50 pounds of beef bones that have been reduced with—cooked down and really to get the good flavor, and turn it to a demi-glace. What we’re going to do is add that in, and there is going to be a good beef flavor. It will melt. It will bring out beef taste. Actually it's going to be the savory. It's going to be the bottom end of your sauce. You’re going to have a balance of sweet with the wine. The wine has got a lot of sugar in it. You got to have a balance of the savory, with the beef stock. The tomatoes are going to do things, the blends in the herbs, or to bring a lot of aroma. You can have a really, really a good marinara with a whole lot of flavor.
Now since we have cooked here just a little bit, what I’m going to do is, I’m going to fell in the bay leaves. I am going to grab my bottle of wine, and I am going to hit it with a little bit more wine. So I’ll let it drink it own up, give it a good, good flavor. Let that reduce. It will be ready in about an hour. And next right now, since it's reducing cooking while we’re waiting, we’re going to show you how to cook and prepare the chicken.