I have to be perfectly honest with you here. I use ranch dip mix, brown gravy mix and jarred pepperocini, but I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around all three mixed together. I’ll take your word that it’s really good. Now if I can only talk my husband into it.
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The jarred pepperoncini is a must and as a pickled pepper it must be jarred, but the other stuff can be simulated. See
That’s what I’ve loosely followed for the last few years and (a) I’m still here to tell the tale, and (b) I’ve enjoyed it.
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Yes, that recipe was the first I’d ever heard of the dish, and also the first recipe I used to make it.
I don’t think the NYT version is that much better, TBH. It’s supposed to be a simple, low-brow dish. Why elevate it?
As for the stick of butter, @fooddabbler - while I do embrace fat, all the extra butter adds is fat. I didn’t find it improved the flavor of the dish, but made it almost inedibly greasy.
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I’ve made it a couple of times and enjoyed it but it isn’t indelibly burned into my brain as a dish I want to make regularly.
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Campbells uses many bio-engineered ingredients. I’m sure they will start producing Rao’s with the same bio ingredients.
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Interesting that the NYT version omits anything that would act like the gravy packet, other than the fact that you flour the beef before searing.
I’ve never bought one so I don’t know for sure, but I guess a gravy packet is not much more than beef bouillon and a thickening element?
So if one wanted The Times’ recipe to completely mimic the “ranch dip mix, brown gravy mix, and pepperoncini” version, I guess you could just sprinkle some dry bouillon atop as well. Might have to adjust salt down by a bit less than the mass of bouillon crystals added.
Oh, and add some (or all) of the pepper brine, which NYT doesn’t mention.
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Agree with you. Every time a company I worked for picked up a product line from another company, one of the things that happened fairly quickly was transitioning the product to our existing preferred raw material vendors.
It was always supposed to be that changes were “transparent to the consumer”, as the corporate lingo goes. But in practice fairly often there’d be consumer complaints that a given product post-transition didn’t work/look/feel the same - and this despite those consumers often not even knowing that the product had changed hands.
Even for stuff as elementary* as chemical compounds - you’d think they’d be the same from vendor to vendor but that’s not necessarily the case, and very small differences in trace contaminants (for example) can really screw up a product.
*Pun not intended, but hey, I’ll go with it. Maybe I should have said “basic” instead.
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After Haagen Dazs was acquired by Dreyers I eventually noticed a difference. While they swear the recipes are the same, if that’s true than clearly the quality of the ingredients are not.
Don’t get me wrong… it is still very good ice cream, just not quite what it used to be.
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Used to drink Grain Belt beer on occasion. Had a very particular character I liked. Got bought out and moved to New Ulm, and it’s very different than the orig. The brewery that bought them, Schells, is a good brewery. Nothing on them. GB just doesn’t have the same character now.
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Agreed about the quality. But I didn’t much care for it the time I tried it to begin with.
Have to add that Rao’s as a restaurant is over rated. Food is good, but no better than 100s of other places. All the hype is based on the mystique of a place that’s difficult to get in to.
Also, its seems many people have no idea how to pronounce the name.
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Rao’s was fun when the old guard was there. Aunt Anne in the kitchen, Frankie working the floor, NIcky “Vests” behind the bar and the old derelict who sat hunched outside and growled, “I’ll watch your car.” although you arrived by cab. The marinara was excellent. I was ecstatic when they started selling it and used to order by the case before it came to every corner store.
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Myself included. Please educate us 
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I originally called it something like Row (sort of rhyming with cow), but at some point I switched over to calling it Ray oh. Not sure why. I might have heard it pronounced that way on America’s Test Kitchen.
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I thought it was Ray-oh’s, as well. What else w/could it be (asking as a non-native speaker)?
I always thought it rhymed with cows. Here’s this which supports it. Not that you can believe everything on YouTube.
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That’s what I thought, but what do I know …
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In NYC the name of the restaurant is pronounced ray-ohs. If you said you were going to eat at rowse or something like that no one would have a clue where you were going. Say ray-ohs and people would be like how the eff did you get in?
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Ray-oh’s
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Background on the acquisition
About how to pronounce the name, you can’t let any knowledge of Italian get in the way. I studied a bit of Italian in college. I spent time in Italy. Italian names in the US bear very little relation to the origins. That’s how we get muzzarel and gabagool.
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