Slow Sunday - Supper

The Ragù That Improves Overnight

Delphine Roy — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

About 2 litres — dinner twice, or once with leftovers frozen
3 hr 40 min total — Serves 8 — Project

Ingredients

For the base

3 tbsp olive oil
100 g pancetta, finely chopped
1 large onion, finely diced
2 carrots, finely diced
2 celery sticks, finely diced
3 garlic cloves, crushed

For the sauce

700 g beef mince, 20% fat, not lean
300 g pork mince
3 tbsp tomato paste
250 ml whole milk
250 ml dry white wine
800 g tinned whole peeled tomatoes
1 parmesan rind, optional
2 bay leaves
salt and black pepper

Almost every long-cooked meat sauce tastes better the next day, and the usual explanation — that the flavours “meld” — is doing a lot of work without saying anything. What actually happens is more interesting and it changes how you cook it.

Overnight in the fridge, the fat that separated during the long simmer solidifies on the surface. When you reheat it gently and stir, that fat re-disperses into the liquid as much finer droplets than it managed the first time, and finely dispersed fat reads on the palate as body and roundness. It is an emulsion that has had twelve hours to sort itself out.

Three additions, in this order

The order is not tradition for its own sake. Tomato paste goes in early and gets fried, which drives off its raw metallic edge and deepens it. Milk goes in next, while the meat is still relatively firm, so the lactose has hours to brown and the proteins have hours to work on the mince. Wine follows to deglaze and lift. Tomatoes come last, because acid tightens protein and putting them in early gives you meat that never fully softens.

Reverse any two of those and you will still eat well, but you will taste the difference.

Why the soffritto takes twenty minutes

Onion, carrot, and celery cooked for five minutes taste of onion, carrot, and celery. Cooked for twenty over a low heat, with salt drawing the water out, they collapse into something sweet and unidentifiable that reads as depth rather than as vegetables. This is the free flavour in the recipe and it costs nothing but patience.

Browning in batches

A kilo of mince dropped into a pan at once drops the temperature below 100C and the meat simply poaches in its own juice. Grey mince cannot be fixed later. Two or three batches, each left undisturbed for a minute before breaking up, gets you the crust that the entire sauce is built on.

The pasta is not an afterthought

Tagliatelle or rigatoni, cooked two minutes short, finished in the sauce with a ladle of the water. A ragù served on pasta rather than tossed through it is a different and worse dish, and it takes the same amount of time.

Roast Chicken Over Torn Potatoes

Delphine Roy — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

One 1.8kg bird, four servings and a carcass for stock
1 hr 35 min total — Serves 4 — Medium

Ingredients

For the bird

1.8 kg whole chicken
2 tsp fine salt, roughly 1% of the bird's weight
1 tsp black pepper
1 lemon, halved
1 head of garlic, halved across the middle

For underneath

1 kg floury potatoes, peeled
3 tbsp olive oil
4 thyme sprigs
flaky salt

A roast chicken has one difficult requirement — skin that shatters over meat that is still juicy — and two things that are usually blamed for missing it: the oven and the bird. Neither is normally the problem. The problem is water.

Chicken skin cannot crisp while it is losing moisture, because evaporation holds the surface at around 100C and browning needs considerably more than that. So the useful work happens the night before, in the fridge, with salt.

Dry brining, in one paragraph

Salt on the surface draws water out of the skin by osmosis, then dissolves into it and is drawn back into the flesh, carrying seasoning with it. Overnight, uncovered, the fridge’s dry air takes the surface moisture away for good. What you have in the morning is a bird seasoned to the bone with skin like parchment, and it will brown in half the time a wet one would.

One per cent of the bird’s weight is the number. For a 1.8kg chicken that is 18g, or about two level teaspoons of fine salt.

Tearing the potatoes

Parboil, drain, steam dry, then tear. A torn potato has a rough, fractured surface with far more area than a cut one, and every one of those ragged edges is somewhere fat can collect and fry. Under a chicken, that fat is rendered chicken fat, and the result is closer to a roast potato than anything a separate tray achieves.

Floury varieties — Maris Piper, russet, King Edward — tear well. Waxy ones resist and stay smooth.

The two temperatures

Twenty minutes at 220C sets and starts the skin while the inside is still cold. Dropping to 190C for the rest means the breast comes up to temperature gently instead of tightening. It is a small thing and it is the difference between good and slightly dry.

No gravy

There is a tin with rendered fat, chicken juices, collapsed garlic, and a roasted lemon in it. Squeezing the lemon and scraping the tin gives you something better than a flour-thickened gravy would, in ninety seconds, and it tastes of the bird rather than of stock.

Short Ribs Braised in Red Wine

Delphine Roy — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

4 large servings
4 hr 30 min total — Serves 4 — Project

Ingredients

For the ribs

1½ kg bone-in beef short ribs
2 tsp fine salt
2 tbsp neutral oil
2 tbsp plain flour

For the braise

2 onions, roughly chopped
2 carrots, cut into thick lengths
6 garlic cloves, peeled, left whole
2 tbsp tomato paste
750 ml dry red wine, something you would drink a glass of
500 ml beef stock
1 star anise
3 thyme sprigs
2 bay leaves

Short ribs are what you buy when you want the effect of a rib of beef for a quarter of the money. They are almost entirely collagen and intramuscular fat, which makes them useless for anything fast and close to unfailable over four hours.

The whole recipe is two decisions: brown them harder than feels sensible, and do not drown them.

Browning is not a step to hurry

Eight to ten minutes a batch, in a pan hot enough to be slightly alarming. Every bit of dark crust is Maillard product, and Maillard product is where the sauce’s colour and about half its flavour live. A pale sear gives you a pale, one-note braise that no amount of stock will rescue.

The light dusting of flour is there for two reasons: it dries the surface further, so browning starts sooner, and it thickens the finished liquid enough that you will not need to do anything about it later.

Why the wine gets reduced

A bottle of wine is roughly thirteen per cent alcohol and a lot of acid. Both need driving off before the long cook, because alcohol left in a covered pot cannot evaporate and stays as a raw, solvent note through the whole braise. Boiled down by half first, the wine turns into concentrated fruit and tannin.

Use something you would drink a glass of. Not because it needs to be expensive, but because anything with an off note will have four hours to concentrate.

Two-thirds, not covered

This is the difference between a braise and a stew. With the top of the meat above the liquid, that surface continues to brown and dry in the oven’s heat while the underside gently poaches, and the two textures are what makes a braise taste layered. Fully submerged, everything comes out uniformly soft.

The day-ahead trick

Cool it, refrigerate it, and lift the solid fat cap off the next morning. You will remove more fat in thirty seconds than twenty minutes of skimming a hot pot achieves, and the sauce will be glossier for it. Then reheat gently, reduce, and serve.

A Pot of Chickpeas Worth the Soak

Delphine Roy — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

About 1.2kg cooked chickpeas plus a litre of broth
1 hr 55 min total — Serves 6 — Easy

Ingredients

For the soak

500 g dried chickpeas
1 tbsp fine salt
2 l cold water

For the pot

1 onion, halved
1 head of garlic, top sliced off
2 bay leaves
1 strip of lemon peel
100 ml olive oil
1 tsp fine salt, plus more at the end

There is nothing wrong with a tin of chickpeas — the bean stew is built on tins and it is a good dish. But a chickpea cooked from dried in an aromatic, oily broth is not the same ingredient. It is creamier, it holds its shape while being soft all the way through, and it tastes of something.

The reason to make a whole pot is that the effort does not scale. Five hundred grams takes exactly as much of your attention as one tin, and it feeds you for a week.

Salt in the soaking water

For years the received wisdom was that salt toughens the skins. It is the opposite. Sodium ions displace the calcium and magnesium that hold pectin in the cell walls rigid, so salted-soaked pulses cook faster and more evenly, with skins that soften at the same rate as the interior rather than bursting first.

A tablespoon in two litres is enough. Rinse before cooking, since the soaking water carries away some of the compounds that make legumes hard work.

The ten-minute hard boil

A short violent boil at the start pushes foam and scum to the surface, where you can skim it, and gets the pot to temperature quickly. After that, hard boiling only breaks the chickpeas up. Everything else happens at a simmer so lazy you have to look closely to see it.

Cooked means cooked

A chickpea that is soft on the outside and faintly chalky in the middle will ruin whatever it goes into and cannot be corrected by more cooking once it has cooled. Test three from different depths, and when in doubt give it another fifteen minutes. Over-cooked chickpeas make excellent hummus; under-cooked ones make nothing.

What to do with them

Warm, in a bowl of their own broth with olive oil and pepper, is dinner. Drained and roasted hard, they are a snack. Blitzed with tahini and lemon they are the best hummus you will make, and they go straight under the whipped feta on a table before dinner.