I come from an Italian family. My mom’s side is from Sicily and my dad’s side is from Calabria. Like any good Italian family, we have a spaghetti sauce that’s been passed down through generations. Grandma DiCello’s tasted a little different than my mom’s, and Grandma Purpura’s tasted a little different from hers. As for “Grandma Purpura”, that just sounds odd. To us, she’s Nana. (In Italian nonna means grandmother. I guess when my sister and I were little, all we could manage was “na-na”. So it stuck.)
I can tell you that my mom’s and Nana’s sauce recipes are identical. The only difference is the meat; Nana sears pork chops and Italian sausage in her saucepan before making the sauce. Then she finishes cooking the meat in the sauce as it simmers. On the other hand, my mom makes the sauce and makes meatballs separately, par-cooks the meatballs in the microwave, and then finishes them in the sauce. Thus, they taste completely different.
We debate all the time who likes which sauce best. Well I like them all! I like my mom’s because it tastes and smells like home. These days when I make sauce, I go with Nana’s method because the pork chops are lean, fork tender, fall apart delicious, and both the pork and the sausage add the most amazing depth of flavor throughout the whole sauce. Plus for my whole-foods diet, I haven’t mastered re-designing the family meatballs without breadcrumbs and parmesan so Nana’s rendition works out easiest for me to make my meal’s protein right in with the sauce.
For instructions on how to make the spaghetti squash to serve as the “pasta” with this sauce, check out my Basic Spaghetti Squash recipe.
When you’re searing the pork, if you find it’s stuck to the pan, it’s not ready to flip. Leave it go and when it’s browned it will release.
Buon appetito!
- 1 tablespoon olive oil
- 1 pound bone-in pork chops
- 1 pound hot Italian sausage
- 3 cloves garlic, minced
- 1 onion, diced
- 1 teaspoon each, salt and pepper
- (1) 6 ounce can tomato paste
- (1) 28 ounce can tomato puree
- (1) 28 ounce can crushed tomatoes
- Sprinkle the pork chops on both sides with salt and pepper.
- Heat olive oil in a large pot over medium heat. Working in batches, brown the pork and sausages on all sides. Once browned, set them aside.
- In the same pan, add the onions and sauté for 5-6 minutes until soft and translucent. As they're cooking, scrape the bottom of the pan to release the browned bits searing the meat left behind.
- Add the garlic, salt and pepper. Cook 2 minutes.
- Add the tomato paste and cook about 1 minute.
- Add the tomato puree and crushed tomatoes. Fill one of the empty 28-ounce cans with water and add it to the pot.
- Add pork and sausage back to the pot. Bring to a boil and turn down to a simmer over medium-low heat. Simmer for at least 1 hour, up to 2 hours.
- To serve, fish out the sausage and pork from the simmering sauce and place into a serving bowl. Plate pasta (saving room to serve the meat alongside) and top with your desired amount of sauce. Buon appetito!
For all you Whole30 eaters out there, as long as your sausage has no added sugar, casein, whey, nitrates or additives other than spices, this recipe is Whole30 compliant.
This looks delicious, Alicia! It would certainly make Nana proud!!! I like how we all take the previous generations’ recipe and make it our own. Who knows what your son or daughter will come up with many years from now!! Mangia!!!
I’m going to enjoy giving this a try, Alicia. Just for clarification, I have a couple questions:
1) Do you always use sausage in links or have you ever tried it “unpacked”?
2) Once everything has simmered, do you shred the pork chops up into the sauce, or serve them whole on the side like the sausages? I’d imagine after an hour or more of simmering they’d be falling off the bone…
Mille grazie,
Mike (pietro)
Ciao Pietro! Hope you enjoy the recipe. Great questions.
1) For this recipe, we traditionally use packed or cased sausages. When I make meat sauce with “unpacked” sausage meat or just ground meat I generally make a different recipe. If you’d like to, you could however brown the sausage here uncased. If browning the unpacked sausage leaves more than just enough fat to coat the bottom of the pan, I suggest draining the fat from the pan before moving on to the next step so you don’t end up with an oily sauce.
2) As for the pork, I don’t generally shred it into the sauce. To serve, we typically fish out the sausages and pork chops from the simmering sauce and place them in a serving bowl on the dinner table. We toss a bit of the sauce with the pasta. To plate it up, we place pasta on the plate, everyone tops their pasta with his/her desired amount of extra sauce, and we all grab our favorite meats on the side. As far as falling off the bone, you got it. That’s exactly what we’re going for. I’ve tried every kind of bone-in pork cut from sliced shoulder steaks to lean pork chops. Generally one hour will do it, but if you get really thick cut pork steaks (1.5 inches or more) you may need closer to the 2 hour mark to achieve that falling off the bone status.
Hope you enjoy the recipe!!
Where’s the seasonings like basil etc.?
You can certainly add some basil or oregano but in this version! I just let the meat add depth of flavor to the sauce. This might be one of the only sauce versions I make without herbs, but I don’t recall Nana using them either unless she made it without the pork and sausage. Hope you enjoy it if you try it!