Part 2- Cooking the Sausage and Tomatoes

By this point, you should already have a nice basic marinara sauce simmering on the stove. Leave it alone mostly, stirring occasionally, while you work on this part of the recipe.

Start by heating a deep, wide skillet on medium-high (6 or 7). You'll know the skillet is ready to use when you hover your hand over the skillet's surface and feel a significant amount of heat coming off of it. When your skillet is heated, simply drop in your block of Sweet or Hot Italian sausage.

Most likely, there will be a piece of butcher paper attached to one side of your sausage. Don't forget to remove this immediately!

Remember the garlic and basil left over from your red sauce? Now is the time to use it! Sprinkle the garlic and basil over your sausage. Since basil and garlic burns much easier than sausage, it's best to leave most of it on top of the sausage until it really gets cooking. After a few minutes, you'll notice that the sausage has produced a film of what appears to be oil on the bottom of the pan. This is melted fat! Sausage does not require any oil or butter to cook, as it is quite full of fat on its own.

Here's what the sausage looks like after being left alone for maybe 2 minutes and flipped over with a spatula. As you can see, already we have a nice crispy surface forming. Mix around the sausage until it is broken up into small pieces to continue cooking it. It's important to make sure the sausage is broken up enough so that you don't get an uneven cook on the inner portions of the bigger bits. No one likes biting into raw meat!

After breaking up your sausage, pour about two tablespoon's worth of brown sugar on it and stir. This will help the sausage caramelize. Eventually your sausage will start to take on a greyish-brown color. Stir occasionally, but while the pink is disappearing from the sausage you might want to take a moment to work on chopping your tomatoes.

Of course, as always, don't forget to wash them first!

Chop your tomatoes on the cutting board with a sharp knife of your choosing. I prefer to just cut them in half since they tend to dissolve in the cooking process, but some people are really unhappy about potential chunks in their food and prefer to cut them smaller. Leave your tomatoes to hang out on the cutting board until there is barely any pink left in the sausage.

During the cooking process, you may realize that a brown crust is forming on the bottom of your pan. Don't worry! So long as it is brown and not black, this is a good thing! What you're seeing is called a Maillard Reaction. Click here to learn more about what a Maillard Reaction is! In summary, it's basically a very flavorful residue that often occurs when cooking meat in a metal pan. The way you get it up off the pan is by using an acidic liquid such as cooking wine. Conveniently, another acidic liquid is tomato juice! So, if you're very against using wine in your recipe, don't worry about your Maillard Reaction buildup and proceed straight to the next part of the recipe. If you're fine cooking with wine, pour a few tablespoons on top of your Maillard crusties and let it sit for a few seconds before stirring it around and integrating it into the sausage with your spatula.

When you add your tomatoes, chop them up with your spatula as best you can. They will soften and disperse with cooking, but it's best to start the process as early as possible. Now is also a good time to add a sprinkling of salt.

If you see any more Maillard reactions popping up, simply pour some more wine and stir around your ingredients again. This will help prevent your meat from drying out as it cooks as well as preventing it from sticking too bad too the pan and burning. During the cooking process, you may need to adjust the heat from medium-high to medium depending on the way your stove works to prevent everything from burning.

Eventually, your sausage mixture will look something like this. At this point, it is ready to be mixed in with the marinara sauce that has been simmering on the stove this whole time.

Dump the sausage into your sauce, stir, and get ready for the final step of your recipe!

At this point, you may leave the sauce on low or simmering for as long as you'd like, even all day! Remember to keep stirring occasionally, around every 10 or 15 minutes. The longer your keep your sauce simmering, the more flavorful it will be. At this point, it has probably already been cooking for some time. However, I very often will get to this point in the recipe, put my stove eye on simmer, and watch a movie while I wait for the sauce to really marinate. This is not absolutely necessary, but I promise it makes a difference!

The final part of the recipe is also the simplest one. In the final addition of this blog post, I will be explaining how to boil pasta. You can access this part of the recipe here.