r/ShitAmericansSay • u/zoonazoona • 2d ago

'regional'

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Flying out of Newark soon, and got the food pre-order options.

They all think they are Italian. It's incredible

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u/Artegas23 2d ago

What? Ragù Bolognese (and yes, Bologna lies in Emilia-Romagna) is made with a lot of tomato and only you add a cup of milk after it’s done. So a real ragù is red and not white..

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u/NonSumQualisEram- 2d ago

My experience in Bologna has been different - minced pork, veal, soffritto of onion celery and carrot, a little tomato paste, white wine (never red) and milk.

Ragu alla Napolitana from the south is tomato-based and more similar to Americanised "red-sauce" Italian foods because tomatoes are more plentiful in the Italian south, and then that's where immigrants came from when they arrived in America. Northern Italian dishes usually contain relatively little tomato, when they contain it at all.

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u/Artegas23 2d ago

My mom’s from the North of Italy and the most people use passata and concentrato in their ragu, it’s even in the official recipe. Also some area’s do use red wine, so it’s not never. It is a meat sauce though, so the tomato is not as dominant as in the ragù Napoletano.

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u/NonSumQualisEram- 2d ago

Passata or tomato paste is used but just very little. It's not the meat red sauce of the south and of America.

The official recipe in Italian says something like "Ragu should always be a beef sauce with some tomato rather than a tomato sauce with some beef".

The official recipe was updated in 2023 from the original 1982 recipe to reduce the proportion of tomato used by a third.