Recipe: The Best Bolognese Sauce This Side of Italy!
*This recipe is an adaptation from Marcella Hazan’s uber famous - and very authentic - version featured in the NY Times.
I don’t know about you but, in times like these, I yearn for and crave comfort food. Be it the Mexican cuisine that I grew up eating, a bowl of matzo ball soup that reminds me of my grandmother, or a warm plate of pasta tangled with a rich meat sauce, I can’t help but look to these nostalgic recipes for some semblance of both physical and emotional nourishment.
Over the past few weeks, I have scoured my brain/cookbook collection/the web for classic ‘comfort food’ recipes. Having never made a Bolognese sauce - even during culinary school or my time spent interning in a test kitchen - I knew that I wanted this to be my next kitchen project/notch in my culinary belt. After narrowing the search down to just two recipes, I chose this particular one because the ingredients list was much shorter and the reviews were excellent. However, I did tweak a few things:
Instead of vegetable oil, I used EVOO
I opted for sour cream instead of milk
For the wine - instead of a dry white - I used Riesling because of its sweeter characteristics
Instead of adding water, I chose beef broth for when the sauce got dry throughout the cooking process
I let my sauce cook for almost 4.5 hours, though I think that 4 is sufficient
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*Must-have items on-hand:
Deep’ish pot
Multi-use grater (for cheese and nutmeg)
Ingredients
(Serves 6 portions)
1 tablespoon EVOO (extra virgin olive oil)
4 tablespoons butter, divided in to 3 and 1
½ cup finely chopped onion
⅔ cup finely chopped celery
⅔ cup finely chopped carrot
1 pound ground beef chuck (you can also use turkey)
Salt
Black pepper, ground fresh from the mill
1 cup sour cream
1/8 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1 cup dry white wine (I used Riesling because of its delicate sweetness)
1 ½ cups canned imported Italian plum tomatoes, cut up, with their juice
14.5 oz can beef broth (or homemade)
1 ¼ to 1 ½. pounds pasta (pappardelle, tagliatelle, or fettuccine)
Freshly grated parmigiano-reggiano cheese at the table
Method
Put the oil and 3 tablespoons of butter in the pot and turn the heat on to medium. Add the chopped onion and stir until it has become translucent. Add the chopped celery and carrot. Cook for about 2 minutes, stirring vegetables to coat them well.
Add ground meat, a large pinch of salt and a few grindings of pepper. Crumble the meat with a fork, stir well and cook until it has lost its raw, pink/red color.
Add sour cream and let it simmer gently, stirring frequently, for about 40-minutes. Add about 1/8 teaspoon of nutmeg, and stir.
Add the wine, let it simmer until it doesn’t smell of alcohol, 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 4 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 beef broth whenever necessary (I ended up using the entirety of the broth, beginning at about the second cooking hour). At the end, however, you do not want a watery sauce, whatsoever. The result should be a thick ragu (see photo, below).
Taste and correct for salt.
Finish w/ 1 tablespoon of butter. Toss with pasta (cooked according to instructions) and serve with freshly grated Parmesan on the side.
The Bolognese sauce should look like this when finished cooking.
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Until we eat again,
The Lunch Belle