Divya Gugnani: Hi! I am Divya Gugnani and we’re here in sunny Los Angeles at Dominick’s Restaurant and Bar in West Hollywood. Here, seeing a celebrity is as common as seeing a plate of spaghetti and meatballs. So let’s go behind the burner and meet the chef.
I am here with Brandon Boudet, chef and owner. So Brandon, I see lots of meat. What are we making?
Brandon Boudet: We’re making spaghetti and meatballs today. I like to use pork and I like use beef. And the trick is to make sure you have enough fat in it. Basically, the beef, we have 85-15. You could pretty much find that at most grocery stores. And then we have a ground pork, it has a little bit more fat in it, 70-30. We’re going to sauté down a little bit of onion, sour parsley and a little bit of garlic.
Divya Gugnani: Wow!
Brandon Boudet: We’re going to cook that down with a little bit of chopped up regular white mushrooms. We’re going to add a little oil and we’re just going to cook it down a little bit. First, we’re going to add a little fennel, salts, crushed red pepper, crushed up and ground porcini mushroom. And then we’re going to add two eggs. We’re also going to put a little bit of breadcrumb in there. So we just want to incorporate everything in there. You don’t want to pack the meat in really hard. You know, the salts cannot penetrate the meatball.
So all I do, it’s about 2 ½ ounce of meatball, we bake the meatballs as opposed to frying them. We do a 350 degree, 350 degrees for 20 minutes. First, we’ll start off with the pasta. Don’t try and save money on pasta. That extra dollar a pound that you spend on the pasta, you will be able to tell the difference.
So here we have dried pasta. When you’re in the store, you can just look at it, you can feel it and it has a nice little rough edge to it. Just put it into salted boiling water. Once it gets pliable, you just want to make sure you stir it up really well so you don’t have that clunk of spaghetti stock together.
Divya Gugnani: Exactly, so it mixes all up.
Brandon Boudet: It’s going to take about 8 to 10 minutes. And here we have tomato sauce. It’s just something that you can have sitting around in a jar, in your refrigerator. What we use here at the restaurant is San Marzano tomatoes, we put them through a ricer or a food mill, okay. It takes out most of the seeds and it crushes them up really well. And then we just cook it down with a little bit sufrito for about three hours or so, two and a half, just to kind of reduce them a little bit, thicken it up just a touch.
The meatballs are ready. Here we go. So they are nice and brown. When I make my spaghetti meatballs and I'm making the sauce for it, basically what I do is I take some of the meatballs, crush them up and add it to my tomato sauce that we just made. Let it simmer for about an hour. And that’s pretty much it. It’s ready to go, toss in the pasta with parmesan cheese.
We’re having a Le Cupole. Yeah, it’s great, it has a little bit of oak on it so it will definitely cut through the food.
Divya Gugnani: What’s really striking about this meatball is how juicy it is. It’s that little bit of spice that sneaks up at you when you finish this off the sauce with creamiest butter.
On Behind the Burner, yhou can enjoy this exclusive opportunity to purchase Brandon Boudet’s wine of choice, Le Cupole.
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