low and slow is the key
to making the best meat sauces.
Recipe adapted from “Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking”
I’ve always loved bolognese meat sauce since I was a kid. Of course, my mother used to just take a jar of regular pasta sauce, brown some ground beef, and then throw it all together, but even that was heaven to me back then. Now that I’m older, I really appreciate the richness of a good bolognese meat sauce. It’s so simple in a sense that when I’m out for dinner and I see it on the menu I want to disregard it, but it’s become such a comfort food to me that I rarely can’t ignore it.
So with that said, I’m really happy to share this bolognese meat sauce recipe with you. I let it cook for like 4 hours. Just letting it cook down, adding more water, letting it cook down again. I kept tasting it along the way and it just better and better. The nice thing is that if you don’t have 3 to 4 hours in a stretch, you can turn off the heat whenever you need to leave and pick up where you left off later as long as your complete the sauce within the same day. And as with almost all pasta sauces I think, it freezes really well.
What’s your favourite pasta & sauce combo? Does yours take hours to cook down to make it amazing? Share your stories below in the comments.
Serves 2 heaping cups, for about 6 servings and 1 1/2 pounds pasta
Ingredients
– 1 TBS vegetable oil
– 3 TBSs butter plus 1 TBS for tossing the pasta
– 1/2 cup chopped onion
– 2/3 cup chopped celery
– 2/3 cup chopped carrot
– 3/4 pound ground beef chuck (anything but lean beef)
– Salt
– Black pepper, ground fresh from the mill
– 1 cup whole milk
– Whole nutmeg
– 1 cup dry white wine
– 1 1/2 cups canned imported Italian plum tomatoes, cut up, with their juice
– 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 pounds pasta, traditionally tagliatelle or pappardelle
– Freshly grated parmigiano-reggiano cheese at the table
Tools
– Dutch oven
Directions
Put the oil, butter and chopped onion in the pot and turn the heat on to medium. Cook and stir the onion until it has become translucent, then add the chopped celery and carrot. Cook for about 2 minutes, stirring vegetables to coat them well.
Add the ground beef, a large pinch of salt and a few grindings of pepper. Crumble the meat with a fork, stir well and cook until the beef has lost its raw, red colour.
Add milk and let it simmer gently, stirring frequently, until it has bubbled away completely. Add a tiny grating, about 1/8 tsp, of nutmeg, and stir.
Add the wine, let it simmer until it has evaporated, then add the tomatoes and stir thoroughly to coat all ingredients well. When the tomatoes begin to bubble, turn the heat down so that the sauce cooks at the laziest of simmers, with just an intermittent bubble breaking through to the surface.
Cook, uncovered, for 3 hours or more, stirring from time to time. While the sauce is cooking, you are likely to find that it begins to dry out and the fat separates from the meat. To keep it from sticking, add 1/2 cup of water whenever necessary. At the end, however, no water at all must be left and the fat must separate from the sauce. Taste and correct for salt.
Toss with cooked drained pasta, adding the TBS of butter, and serve with freshly grated Parmesan on the side.
Adventures in Food 