Name: Angelo Competiello's Winning Wild Boar Ragu
Prep time: 25 min
Cook time: 2 h 15 min
Total time: 2 h 40 min
Cuisine: Italian
Ingredients: 2 lbs wild boar shoulder, cut into ¾-inch cubes; 4 oz pancetta, finely diced; 1 medium yellow onion, finely diced; 3 medium carrots, finely diced; 4 celery stalks, finely diced; 6 garlic cloves, minced; 1 cup full-bodied red wine (Barolo or Brunello); 1 can (28 oz) San Marzano tomatoes, crushed by hand; 2 tbsp tomato paste; 2 cups low-sodium beef stock; 2 bay leaves; 4 fresh thyme sprigs; 1 tbsp olive oil; Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste

They call him the Porchetta King of Suffern, New York, which is a title you earn by doing one thing so many times and so correctly that it becomes definitional. Angelo Competiello runs Alta Irpinia — restaurant and provisions shop — out of a town most New Yorkers drive through without stopping. They should stop.

Wild boar ragu demands longer and lower than pork ragu, and Competiello knows this. The boar shoulder goes into a braise at 275°F for four hours before it sees any pasta — the connective tissue has to convert to gelatin before the meat will release. He builds his soffritto with a higher carrot ratio than most Italian-American cooks, which rounds the gaminess without masking the boar flavor. The pasta is sauced in the pan, not plated dry, so the starch from the pasta water binds the fat into the sauce rather than letting it pool on the plate.

Bobby Flay, who could ragu anything with enough Calabrian chiles and canned San Marzanos, met a sauce that had actually been thinking about wild boar before he showed up. The Porchetta King did not flinch.