Bolognara is a smash-up between two classic Italian pasta dishes- Bolognese and carbonara. I suppose I could also call it carbonese, but I like bolognara better- there is something less awkward about it. It’s about the most non-traditional thing ever, and I don’t want to get bludgeoned to death by stalwart supporters of the old world, but it’s really the perfect antidote to the typical holiday fare gracing our tables this season I couldn’t resist. Shhh, don’t tell your Italian nonna, k?

Here’s how it’s done: make Bolognese. Slave over it all day. Sweat. Curse. Accidentally slice your palm to the quick when you use an upside-down boning knife to shove filet down the meat grinder since you lost the little shover mallet tool. Glug half the bottle of wine you earmarked to slosh into the Bolognese sauce because you officially need it more than the sauce does, damn it! Use bacon instead of pancetta because you have homemade bacon and the pancetta from Whole Foods tastes like fat-laced cardboard.

Apologize again for bastardizing the recipe with bacon, but secretly know it’s a pretty good idea. Try not to let the butcher know you plan to grind up his precious veal and pig and cow tenderloins to use in a sauce- he will shake his head and think you’re a pretentious little snob even though you’re wearing rain boots that very nearly match his hip-waders. Shake your head and ponder why butchers and fishmongers sometimes wear hip-waders.

Make bucatini with your handy dandy pasta extruder and spill a quart of semolina all over the freshly-mopped kitchen floor. Deliberate whether to re-appropriate the semolina back into the pasta dough or to toss it. Toss it after toddler Bentley and evil Italian cat Sogno who says “ciao” instead of “meow” both decide scooting through it sounds like fun. Leave the pasta to dry, the sauce to simmer, and decide cleaning out the refrigerator would be a good idea. Start cleaning it out with the highest of hopes. Spy the wine refrigerator next to it.

Give in to the practical voice in your ear telling you cleaning out the wine fridge would be wise and somehow more necessary. Clean out the wine fridge. Explain to readers that in this instance “clean” means randomly remove bottles, open them, and start drinking them. Take Bentley for a walk and bring two sippy cups. One full of milk for him, the other full of something equally soothing for mommy’s nerves.

Have a eureka! moment while pondering how to make the best Bolognese you’ve ever eaten- ADD A RUNNY EGG! Attempt to explain this revelation while on said walk to a neighbor you forgot was vegan AND gluten-free.  Wither at the sheer look of disdain on her face as you remember too late that she won’t appreciate your homemade bacon, ground up tenderloin, or wheat-based pasta just like she didn’t appreciate the time you personally killed a dozen chickens recently.

Race home, toss some duck eggs into the Sous Vide Supreme, come up with a catchy name, and thoroughly impress willing dinner guests with the word bolognara and the dish itself when you plop a perfect egg on top of their bucatini Bolognese.

No giant feast is complete with some kind of contest, be it an attempt to float gummy bears in a river of Pabst or a quest to determine who can eat the most twinkie-weiner sandwiches in five minutes while whistling. On American Thanksgiving (a holiday you might’ve heard of but more likely you know about the holiday the day before entitled Wild Turkey Wednesday which involves drinking Wild Turkey shots until poker matches involving betting socks and Tablewater crackers ensue) I was mindful of the contest credo.

Contests are improved if they are labeled with the word “off” following the type of action to occur, such as a “bake-off,” a “dance-off,” or the ever-popular “jerk-off” which has participants all attempting to be the biggest jerk (sheesh, what did you think I meant!).

Knowing I needed an “off” to elevate my contest to a classier plane, I decided to call it the CranberryRelishSousVideVersusStovetop-Off. Catchy, isn’t it? If you weren’t able to ascertain by the moniker, the goal of the contest was to determine which cranberry sauce brings all the bees to their knees. And by “bees” I mean party guests and by “knees” I mean near-orgasmic state.

The parameters were simple: use the exact same ingredients, but prepare them two different ways. I went classic in style, both because I didn’t want to add any offending flavors that might confuse the surely untrained palates of the random lot of revelers and because I wanted a basic litmus on which to expand in greater detail once a consensus was established.  The single decisive factor in the test is the method of cooking.

Alcohol doesn’t do well en sous vide because it doesn’t have anywhere to go/burn off in the sealed chamber, so sadly, no booze allowed in either batch of cranberries this year. As you probably surmised, I made up for the lack of port in the cranberry sauce by filling my own internal saucetank with it (via secret nips off the bottle all morning and afternoon in addition to my public wine consumption). The basic recipe for both sauces follows these findings if you care to exact a precision “off” of your own.

foreground to rear: sous vide, stovetop, placebo

No great scientific experiment is possible without the inclusion of a placebo of some sort, and folks, this was truly a “great scientific experiment.” Thus, I included in my taste test one honest-to-gelatinous can of Ocean Spray Cranberry Slop just to make sure to get an accurate reading from my unsuspecting test subjects (formerly known as friends before this “off” occurred and they demoted me to nerdy lab tech status).

I know you’re wishing I’d just shut up and present the findings, so, my *new friends* (I’m hosting a corndog-off at my house next week, btw, wanna come?) drumroll please…………………………………………………………………………..

Most guests (shockingly!) were able to ascertain the placebo sample right away and all but one stalwart of the Swansons Turkey Dinner Days dismissed it out of hand. The reviews came flying in fast and fervent on the real competitors, and they were initially mixed. The sous vide style retained more of the original form-factor of the fruits (both the cranberries and the clementines) whereas the stovetop method broke down the individual components into a more uniform sauce. Most preferred the texture of the sous vide because of this, but, like the great crunchy vs creamy peanut butter debate, this is likely a matter of personal taste.

Next we evaluated acidity, or, tartness as we called it ‘round the table. After a meandering discussion on who was the biggest tart at thanksgiving (guess who won?!) I extracted from people that the sous vide sauce was more tart. It may be because the sugars did not break down as fully as with the stovetop sauce. Reviews were mixed in terms of preference on acidity- half liked the tarty sauce better, half liked the sweet. If it weren’t a room full of gay men I would have made a correlation to that being the way they liked their women: either girl-next-door-sweet or tawdry like a Mad Men secretary.

The game changed when we introduced turkey to the milieu. Nearly everyone preferred the sous vide sauce with the turkey because the other sauce came across as cloying with the savory flavors. Remember- this is a sauce composed of the exact same ingredients, so I find this particular result quite intriguing.

The final judgment factor was viscosity. The stovetop berries were cooked just to the point of forming a cohesive sauce and much of the natural liquid present in the fruits had a chance to evaporate. This made for ideal viscosity, whereas the sous vide sauce had nowhere for the liquid to disappear (since it was entirely cooked in a bag) therefore they were slightly liqueous for most tasters.

The ultimate verdict is that the sous vide sauce is superior in taste and texture, and it pairs better with traditional Thanksgiving dishes, however the stovetop method killed it in viscosity. The simple fix to that would be to pull the bag from the water bath and dump the contents in a saucepan to reduce for just a few moments before service. Of course this would kind of employ both techniques, but not for long, and it’s what I will do in my house in the future.  Here’s the recipe I used- hope this great cranberry debate inspires you to perform a few strategic “off’s” of your own in the coming year.  xo, linda

Cranberry Sauce

Serves 8 as a side dish

• 2 c cranberries ( I used local & organic)
• ¾ c sugar
• 3 clementines, peeled and sectioned
• ½ tsp freshly-grated ginger
• Dash cinnamon
• Pinch salt

Methods:

Sous Vide: takes 2-3 hours inactive time

1. Heat the water bath to 185°F. Place all ingredients in a food-safe bag and seal. Cook in the water bath for 2-3 hours, depending how soft you like your fruit (I prefer 2 hours). Remove bag, open, and serve.

*at this point I would have poured the contents of the bag into a saucepan and reduced over medium heat on the stovetop for 3 minutes to thicken the sauce if I had it to do over.

Stovetop:  takes 25 minutes

1. Combine all ingredients in a saucepan along with 4 tbsp water. Bring to boil over low heat, place lid on saucepan, and continue to cook, stirring occasionally, until all the cranberries burst and the sauce is thick and syrupy, about 20 minutes.

There are a passel, no a fat lot of words you should avoid when discussing food, and revelatory is one of them, as are all its forms: revelation, revelatory et cetera. But WTF is a girl to say when she truly, unmistakably has a REVELATION when she puts something inside her mouth? How can you describe a dish that has revelatory qualities WITHOUT using the word revelatory? Let’s try and skirt it, shall we? This is gonna be AWESOME, or as someone I recently blocked on facebook often says, AWSOME sans the center “E”. As in, “this voodoo doll I just made of Mariah Carey is SOOOO AWSOME.” Gag me.

So I wanted to make really succulent, disintegrating pork tenderloin and I knew slow and low was the name of the game. You know me, if it’s slow and low, it’s en sous vide, right? Sous vide pork tenderloin, however, needs a little somethin’ somethin’ to get the juices flowing, so for a moment I pondered sauce. The bed of sunchoke gnocchi I planned to serve it on was non-negotiable, and in terms of complementary flavors to sunchokes, I tend to like something earthily sweet.

Agrodolce came to mind, which is an Italian sweet and sour sauce. Italians often prepare rabbit in sweet and sour sauce, or coniglio in agrodolce.  I once dined on this dish in the wine cellar of an elderly woman who had painstakingly prepared the rabbit the same way she had been taught by her mother, who had learned it from her own mother and so on. The bella nonna looked pleased but pained when I complemented her on the succulence of the rabbit. She explained that she loved making it, but couldn’t really eat it anymore because of all the tiny rabbit bones that inevitably infiltrate the sauce.  Trying to be ever-helpful, I suggested she substitute chicken for the rabbit instead, since the bones were larger and easier to avoid. Her eyes grew as big as figs and she shuffle/stomped off.  I ran the conversation through my head trying to figure out if I had misspoke, in my shaky Italian.

She avoided me for much of the night, sending her husband to our section of the table with any subsequent courses. Befuddled about my apparent lack of manners, I drowned my sobriety in bicchiere after bicchiere of Barbaresco. The wine must have fortified me- and slackened my tongue- for I cornered the sweet little woman and accosted her in ubriaco Italian asking her what I had done. She was either a kind soul or a pious one, as her eyes softened and she apologized for the abrupt end to our earlier conversation. She explained to me that it would simply be unthinkable to use any other meat in coniglio in agrodolce because that was just how it had been done forever. Why was I, some enterprising New Worlder, waltzing into her country, her region, and telling her how to prepare her food? Even if it made complete sense it was still an abject imposition on tradition.

And now would you look at me? Obviously I did not learn my lesson, because not only am I making an agrodolce sauce for pork tenderloin, I’m MAKING IT WITH CRANBERRIES- the horror! The cranberry element adds the perfect element of tart piquancy you want in a sweet and sour sauce, thus enabling me to use Verjus instead of vinegar for a slightly sweeter take on the acidity factor. Here’s the thing about this sauce though. It’s fucking revelatory. I can’t help it, there are no other words to describe the lip-licking delight that is this sauce.  Older readers might remember sunchoke gnocchi has appeared here in a previous life, so I won’t post the recipe, but rest assured, if you’re looking for a clever use for sunchokes, there is no other place you’d rather be.

Pork Tenderloin Cranberry Agrodolce

Serves 4-6, 8 hours inactive, ½ hour active time

• 1 pork tenderloin
• 2 cups cranberries
• ½ c honey
• 3 bay leaves
• Salt
• 2 tbsp butter
• 1 medium shallot, chopped
• ¾ c Verjus

1. Heat the water bath to 185°F. Place the tenderloin, cranberries, honey, bay leaves and salt in a food safe vacuum bag and seal.  Immerse in the water bath for 6-8 hours.
2. Remove the tenderloin bag and separate the tenderloin from the berry liquid.
3. In a medium saucepan, saute the shallot in butter for 3 minutes, until just softened. Add the contents of the tenderloin bag as well as the verjus, minus the tenderloin. Reduce for 6 minutes, or until the sauce thickens slightly. Just before service, add the tenderloin, which should be in pieces. Stir to heat through, and serve over pasta, such as sunchoke gnocchi.