Il Tocco, U Tuccu, La Salsa Tuco

In which we explore the next Argentine tomato sauce inspiration.

The sauce… the dish, is Il Tocco alla Genovese, or in local Ligurisan dialect, U Tuccu Zeneize. It’s a classic of the cuisine of Genoa, in northwestern Italy. Basically it’s a tomato based braise of veal, and the reduced tomato sauce is served over slices of the slow cooked meat. Or, the meat is served on the side of a plate of pasta with the sauce on it - usually something ravioli-ish.

While I haven’t been able to find any numbers that break down the mass Italian immigration into Argentina, my sense is that Ligurians or Genoans, were not a huge percentage. I’m basing that purely on anecdotal evidence of the types of Italian restaurants found here, which almost wholly lean towards central and southern Italian cooking. But I could be way off base. I recall that the chef at Trattoria Olivetti, one of my favorites in the city, is from Liguria.

I can’t tell you how this rich, braised meat and mushroom sauce from Genoa has become, over time, a delicious, yet pale cousin of the original here in Argentina, where it’s called salsa tuco. It’s not for lack of the necessary ingredients. Perhaps it’s just an attempt to recall a general flavor essence of adding meat stock to a tomato sauce, without the actual meat (though some people do add ground beef to their tuco here, it’s not the “official” recipe).

As usual, for Argentine friends, I don’t swear this matches the way your grandma makes it, or the way you learned it in that cooking class you took once. It’s the way I make it, based on trying various recipes for it over the time I’ve been here.

What do we have here for our sauce? We have plum tomatoes, preferably a bit overripe so they’ll breakdown easier, a red onion (white or yellow onions are perfectly fine), a red bell pepper, garlic cloves, a leek (some folk prefer scallions or spring onions), some herbs - 1/2 tsp each of parsley and basil, 1/4 tsp each of thyme and bay leaf. This can, of course, be made with fresh herbs, but most of the recipes I see here call for dried - often using a packaged “Italian herbs” mixture, and in a slower cooked sauce like this, they actually work better. You could add some fresh parsley and basil at the end if you like, for color and freshness. Tomato paste, beef demiglace (or just a well reduced beef stock), and red wine. Olive oil, salt, and pepper, of course are at the ready.

Sauté the chopped onion and pepper in a little olive oil with just a large pinch of salt, for about 5-6 minutes, until soft and turning transluscent.

Add the chopped garlic and leek and continue cooking about another 2-3 minutes.

Add the tomato paste… another 2-3 minutes.

By now you’ve got some browning going on. Deglaze with the red wine and stir it around well, making sure to scrape up any bits that have stuck to the pan.

Add the chopped tomatoes, the demiglace or stock, the herbs, about a dozen grinds of black pepper, and a pinch more of salt.

Cook down over low heat until the tomatoes are falling apart - about 20 minutes for me. I added a little bit of the simmering salted water from the pasta pot just to make sure it didn’t dry out, plus it helps the tomatoes breakdown. You can let the sauce sit at this point until you’re ready to make the pasta - or you can start the pasta cooking about five minutes before this point.

Add the pasta to the pot along with a couple of ladles of the starchy salted pasta water. As usual, I’ve taken the pasta out of the water about two minutes short of the recommended cooking time (the pasta I’m using is bucatini, because I wanted something thicker than spaghetti). Finish cooking the pasta to al dente in the sauce.

It will absorb that pasta water, and the starch will help make the sauce “clingy”.

Grate some parmigiano over the top and then mix it in. Use as much as you like! Adjust seasoning if needed - it shouldn’t need any salt, given the use of the pasta water, but you may, as I did, want to add a little more black pepper.

And, serve it up. Grate a little more cheese over the top if you like. Enjoy!

I think I’m going to just do one more Argentine tomato sauce, scarparo, and then maybe hit the two bechamel based white sauces that are really common - parisienne and principe del napoli. I’m not going to do puttanesca, because really, it’s the same as it is in Italy (click the link for my version), though usually just with less, or no, chili. And a plain bechamel (which to me is really weird on pasta) or a salsa rosa, which is just fileto sauce mixed with some bechamel to turn it pink, aren’t interesting enough to devote a column to. Then I’m going back to exploring Italian sauces, and sauces from other parts of the world!