SUNDAY SAUCE

SUNDAY SAUCE

HOW-TO

Stoner rock pioneer Chris Goss shows us it’s all in the way you chop the onions

Jaan Uhelszki

Masters of Reality’s Chris Goss is an anomaly. Public and private, pragmatic yet otherworldly—if you squint your eyes, his Wikipedia photo looks like a flinty Nosferatu on a day pass from Transylvania, while in others he’s a Zen master in a rainbow-hued Moroccan market hat sitting serenely under the spiky California pepper trees strung with tiny birdhouses, wind chimes, metal skeletons, and miniature teapots, like out-of-season Christmas ornaments at his home in California’s high desert. He’s a feline enthusiast, a collector of midcentury pottery, occult books, and kitchen ephemera, and a multihyphenate in more ways than you might suspect, starting his career as a dishwasher in the most upscale restaurant in Syracuse, making enough money there to buy his first Les Paul, then going on to work at various posh eateries before getting hired as one of the head chefs in the kitchen at the JW Marriott in the bustling college town.

He started his official musical career as a punk rocker in New York, palling around with Joey Ramone and wearing a blue raincoat on the subway that said “Kill Me, I’m Bored,” before he executed an about-face and formed Masters of Reality—named after a misspelled Black Sabbath song—first as a two-piece blues-rock power outfit with a guitarist and a dmm machine, before he added more members and invented what came to be known as stoner rock with the 1989 debut, Blue Garden, a record and tour that propelled Goss into being one of the most influential figures in the genre. Five more Masters albums arrived—at intermittent intervals, one with legendary Cream drummer Ginger Baker in the lineup—and a new one, their first in 15 years, called Workhouse Howl is due this September with new member and Eleven’s Alain Johannes.

Along the way Goss expanded his oeuvre and added production to his CV, his first endeavor coming after his wife, Cynthia, discovered the unknown desert upstarts then called Sons of Kyuss when she worked at BMI. “We went to see them and there were only five people in the audience, counting us,” Goss says with a laugh. “But I knew right away they were something special—they swung like a giant blob! Since I was a new guy in L.A., I figured I better get to them before some trendy rock producer wrecked them, so I went up to them and said, ‘I want to produce your record.’ Never mind that I had never produced anyone before.”

He went on to work on Kyuss’ next three albums. When they morphed into Queens of the Stone Age (named after a nickname he gave them in the studio), he produced two of their best albums and played on five of them, earning him the title of Godfather of Desert Rock.

It occurred to us for this month’s How-To column to go to the Godfather of Desert Rock to learn how to produce records. But Goss had other ideas (although he did give us a few tips on producing). Instead he was channeling another Godfather and wanted to show us how to make Napolese pasta sauce, known to Sopranos lovers as Sunday Gravy. Since it was actually Sunday, who were we to argue? We should have suspected something like this with all the Masters songs with food references.

CREEM photographer Sheva Kafai and I made the long dusty trip to where Goss and his wife live, in an old deconsecrated church—never mind what denomination, but when they moved in, the windows were all blocked out, so that has got to tell you something—high atop a dusty mountain, four miles past the Joshua Tree Inn, where Gram Parsons took his last breath but not where U2 recorded their 1987 album, despite the name. Nothing is as it seems in the high desert.

And to answer the question I know you’re wondering about: Is making spaghetti sauce like producing?

“No, it’s like writing and arranging,” replies Goss, only a little exasperated, like we should have known better than to ask. Glad we didn’t inquire about Ants in the Kitchen...

Anyway, take it away, maestro.

NAPOLESE SAUCE (SUNDAY SAUCE)

Give yourself a full day’s time to make this sauce. Italian grandmothers start it right after dinner on a Saturday and let it cook all night. It’s called Sunday Sauce for a reason. It’s the only day of the week you’ll have enough time to do it properly because it needs constant tending. Your kitchen will end up being a greasy, tomato-splattered mess, and you’ll be finding little blobs of red in unexpected places for months.

INGREDIENTS:

IV2 pounds of whatever pork meat you want Get the cheapest cuts since they have the most fat, which you want. Get the cut that is on sale this week. You can use pork chops, ribs, pork neck bones in this dish.

pounds Italian pork sausage

Most store brands are fine. But look to see if it’s made with fennel. Buy that one. It’s more authentically Italian.

2 chopped medium onions I like yellow onions.

% cup olive oil You don’t need to use the expensive stuff. I used Iberia Premium Blend.

4 28-oz. cans Cento whole peeled tomatoes with basil My favorite cook, Lidia Bastianich, only uses the San Marzano tomatoes in her sauce. Make sure you get the whole peeled tomatoes. And don’t throw out the cans! I’ll tell you why in a minute.

2 6-oz. cans of Cento tomato paste

2 cups of water, or fill up the empty tomato can 2/3 full You can use the other cans to skim the fat, and another as a spoon rest.

V2 cup sweet Sicilian marsala wine

¥2 cup pinot grigio

¥2 cup (7-8 leaves) torn fresh basil

Or, if you have to use dried, 1 tbsp.

1 tsp. salt

¥2 tsp. freshly ground black pepper

4 cloves of garlic Or one clove for each can of tomatoes.

1 tbsp, sugar If needed, to balance the acidity of the tomatoes. Some cans are sweet enough that you don't need to add sugar. Taste first. All Italian grandmothers add it, but they’ll lie about it.

IAdd 2 tbsp, of olive oil to a sauté pan; heat the oil in • a large heavy pot over medium heat. Pat the pork dry and put the pieces in the pot. Cook, turning occasionally, for about 15 minutes or until nicely browned on all sides. Transfer pork to a plate.

2 In the same pan, add the onions, stirring constantly.

• Don’t take your eyes off the onions because they brown quickly, and you don’t want them to do that because they’ll turn bitter. Instead, you want the onions to soften and become transparent. This is when a miracle happens. The acidity in the onions along with the heated oil will lift all the brown bits from the meat off the bottom. I didn’t make that up. Julia Child was the first one to call them brown bits. Now everybody does.

3 Add tomato paste and a few tablespoons of water.

• I always figure one can of tomato paste for one 28-oz. can of whole tomatoes. This mixture of paste, onions, fat, and brown bits has to be watched over and stirred continually. It will bubble and gurgle like hot lava on Vesuvius. So don’t stand too close to the pan, but make sure you don’t let it stick. Presto, change-o, in about 10 minutes the paste will transform from its original dark red to a lighter orange. It’s a miracle and apparently a sign from St. Anthony, the patron saint of Italian cooking. (Isn’t St. Anthony the patron thing of lost things and the starving? But we guess we can see how you can make that work. —Ed.)

Lower heat to a low simmer. Cover. But don’t forget to keep stirring the sauce with a wooden spoon, making sure you keep scraping the bottom of the pan to make sure nothing is sticking.

Let it cook a little bit and then add the wine, an equal mix of marsala and pinot grigio. This will help it emulsify with the tomato paste so when adding the crushed tomatoes it’ll bond better, building more flavor.

4. Open up four cans of San Marzano tomatoes and crush them in your bare hands, breaking them apart. It gives the tomatoes a more rustic texture, half chunky, half smooth. And to be real, Italian Nonnas like it better that way. Swish the empty cans with water, making sure to get all the tomato bits left behind—Italians hate to waste food—then add that to the sauce. Salt as you go. Every time you add something, salt it; keep building the flavors. Add four cloves of garlic, slightly smashed with the flat end of a chef’s knife, and put them in the pot whole. (That way they’re easier to remove at the end. Not everybody likes garlic. I didn’t used to even add any garlic the first 50 times I made this.)

5. Add the pork and the sausage into the sauce, making sure to get all the fat that has collected on the plate. Add more salt and sugar, if needed, and pepper.

6. Now let the sauce just go. Play all of Ginger Baker’s solo albums, smoke some cigarettes, put reruns of the Dean Martin TV show on TV Land with the sound off, but don’t do anything too taxing because for the next five hours you’ll be getting up off the couch and stirring the pan every 10 minutes.

During this period lots of the water will start to evaporate. Fat will rise to the top. The sauce will thicken. It’s time to skim the fat, taking one of the empty tomato cans and scooping up anything that comes to the surface. Before you’re done, you should have the can filled up almost a third of the way.

7. Twenty minutes before the sauce is due to come off the stove, boil water for pasta, salting it liberally. Choose your favorite pasta shape, one that can stand up to the thick sauce, like rigatoni or bucatini (thick spaghetti.) Top with grated Locatelli Romano.

If all else fails, buy a couple jars of Rao’s Tomato Basil Sauce and add meat as desired.