Where to Cut Corners Safely, and Where Not To
Here's the thing about this lesson. We're near the end now, and I want to talk about something I probably should have said in week one, except I don't think it would have landed the same way before you'd made the ragu, before you'd salted the pasta water like the ocean, before you knew what the real version tastes like. Now you've got something to compare against. So now we can talk about cutting corners.
Because you will. Tuesday isn't Sunday. Nobody's got three hours on a Tuesday, and if this class taught you that Italian cooking has to be a production, I did you wrong. Some corners are perfectly safe to cut. Some aren't, and cutting them just means you did work for nothing. Let me sort them out for you.
Safe to cut
Jarred sauce, some weeks. I said this early on and I'll say it again because I meant it. A real ragu costs you about ten minutes of actual hands-on work, and the rest is just waiting, so I'd rather you make it. But some Tuesdays you get home at six-thirty and there isn't ten minutes of anything left in you. Jarred sauce is fine. Doctor it with a browned onion and whatever ground meat you've got if you want, or don't. Nobody's grading you.
Fresh herbs, most of the time. Dried oregano and basil are made for this. I keep fresh basil around because I like growing it (badly, some summers, the dry air out here cooks it faster than you'd think and I lost half a plant one year before I figured out to water it twice a day) but on a Tuesday, dried is doing 90 percent of the job for 10 percent of the effort. Save the fresh stuff for when you're actually going to notice it, torn over the top right at the end.
Garlic bread from a store loaf. I've told you already, I can't bake bread worth eating, so I don't try. Buy a decent loaf, split it, butter it, garlic it, broil it for two minutes with the door cracked so you don't walk away and burn it. That's the whole corner and it's a good one to cut.
Grating your own parmesan versus buying it pre-grated. Buy the wedge if you can, it does taste better and it melts better, but the green can isn't a moral failing. I won't pretend I've never used it on a bad week.
Not safe to cut
Salting the pasta water. I will die on this hill. It's the cheapest improvement in the entire kitchen and it costs you literally nothing but a spoonful of salt, and skipping it is the one corner that actually costs you flavor for free. Don't skip it.
Letting the meat actually brown before you add liquid. This is the step everybody rushes, and it's the one doing the most work. If you dump everything in the pot at once because you're in a hurry, you get a sauce that tastes like boiled meat instead of one that tastes like something. Give it the ten minutes. Set a timer if you have to, I still do, ever since I walked off to change a lightbulb and came back to a scorched pan and a kitchen that smelled like a campfire for a week.
A dull knife, ever, for any reason. This isn't really a corner, it's just a bad idea dressed up as one. A dull knife slips because you have to push harder to make it cut, and that's when you nick yourself. Sharpen it or get someone to sharpen it for you. It's safer, not just faster.
Tasting as you go. People treat this like an optional flourish and it's not, it's the actual instruction. Your tomatoes are more acidic than mine were in class, your stove runs hotter or cooler, we're at 4,600 feet here and that changes things you wouldn't expect. If you don't taste along the way you're just hoping the recipe was written for your kitchen. It wasn't.
Now, here's a corner I want to be honest about, because it's a good example of how these things aren't always obvious. A neighbor's kid came over for dinner once and dipped his garlic bread in fry sauce, right there at the table, like it was nothing. I about fell out of my chair. Felt like watching somebody cut every corner in the book at once. But I tried it later, quietly, when nobody was around to see, and I'll be honest, it wasn't terrible. It's not a corner I'd tell you to cut on purpose. But it taught me something about how I decide what "wrong" even means in a kitchen, which is mostly just "different from how I learned it." Some corners aren't unsafe, they're just unfamiliar. Worth telling those two apart before you decide which ones you're allowed to cut.
The test I use, for what it's worth, is this: does the corner save you time, or does it save you flavor at the cost of time you didn't actually need to save. Jarred sauce saves you real time on a night you don't have it. Skipping the salt saves you nothing, you just forgot.
Before next time: think about which nights are actually your Tuesdays, the tight ones, and decide now which corners you're willing to cut on those nights so you're not deciding it hungry and standing at the stove.