- I'm Ted Hopson. I'm the Chef Owner
of The Bellwether.
We're gonna make food
that I eat on my days off
instead of food that I make
at the restaurant every day.
We're gonna go here at Grassroots,
buy some fun ingredients.
I grew up very Italian,
my family's all Italian.
So we're gonna make some
pasta, that's what we eat.
We're gonna do a style
called Ragu Genovese,
like a very braised
meat heavy kind of ragu.
First ingredient we're gonna get, wine,
the most important ingredient.
If we go with the Pinot
Noir we'll have kind of
a sweeter style.
Probably buy two bottles, one to drink
and one to cook with.
The kind of denser your sauce,
the thicker your pasta should be
and the lighter your sauce,
the lighter your pasta should be.
We're gonna have a meaty sauce
so we really want something
with more texture.
Tomatoes, that'll be perfect.
Bone broth, it's a new fancy
way of saying stock, really.
I think chefs, when they're at home,
don't want complicated things, like,
we always usually just
want something easy.
So that's what this is,
it's a very easy, like,
braised meat pasta.
We don't serve this dish in my restaurant.
This is like that family heirloom dish.
So we're back at my house now
and we're gonna go take our groceries,
make some dinner.
I always like to use dutch ovens.
They'll last like a lifetime.
These are things that people,
like, pass down to their kids.
So I'm just gonna cut it in half.
Salt and pepper.
People always ask, like, "Oh, as a chef
"do you have, like, lobsters and truffles
"and steak at home?"
It's like, no, not at all.
You're day off is no different
than a chef's day off
and you don't exactly look
forward to, like, hours of work.
You have a nice sizzle
when you put it in the pan.
And you can see you're starting
to get that nice color.
Old Italian cuisine and culture
isn't rooted in the fact
that it's expensive.
It's rooted in the fact
that it's made, you know,
for people on a budget and
so you use a lot of onion
because it really adds
that bulk to the sauce
that's not already there.
This sauce takes a long time to make.
There's no if, ands or buts about it.
So we're gonna take our time,
we're gonna do it right.
So I grew up around food.
My grandmother, like I said,
being an immigrant Italian,
like, all she did was, you know,
cook and clean every day.
Hey, let's check our beef.
Browning kind of adds flavor,
adds dimension, adds body.
That's gonna come out.
So now we're gonna get our onions
and that's gonna go right in.
So onions are sweated down now.
Now we're gonna take a
bottle of wine, add it in.
Very relaxing, should be a relaxing thing.
You know, if you're cooking at home
and you're stressing out,
you'r doing it wrong.
We're gonna take our tomatoes.
We're actually gonna add
the braised meat back in.
Braise is cooking a meat,
kind of below a simmer
for a long period of time in a liquid.
We'll cover it.
I shredded the meat.
I added it back into that liquid.
I reduce until it's nice and thick.
You're looking for a
pasta sauce in the end.
Yeah, you wanna use a good amount of salt
whenever you're making pasta.
That will help season the pasta itself.
So instead of it just being bland,
it'll actually have a
little bit of flavor.
Gouda is very, like, melty.
We're gonna use the wild
arugula we got at the store.
This smells really good
too, why don't you smell it?
Yeah.
What makes food magical
is that someone loved it
at some point.
Someone really put care
and attention into it.
And I think there's
that emotional component
with the cooking that
sometimes people overlook
that I feel is very important.
Like I was saying earlier, this is a dish
that my grandmother use to make for me.
This is what the day offs are all about
is, you know, being
able to spend this time.
This is the fun part about a chef day off.
