Bolognese Sauce | The Foodie Pilgrim

By John, 21 June, 2020

Region

Description

Ragù is a generic word for sauce, except that for a lot of people the only sauce they mean is this super-classic meat sauce from Bologna. It's very rich, but well-balanced, and it's delicious with many wines.

This is usually served in generous amounts on small quantities of broad flat pasta like a tagliatelle.

This uses a million ingredients and it takes some time to prepare, but you can easily double or triple the recipe and freeze the extra. Don't cut corners on the ingredients; they are all here for a reason, and together they make a great harmony of flavors. After all, if you were staging an opera and had no tenor, you wouldn't substitute a baritone and figure nobody will notice!

Yield

6 Servings

Preparation time

3 hours

Ingredients

4 T Unsalted Butter

5 oz Beef Stock

1 t Black Pepper (freshly ground)

2 pn ground nutmeg

6 oz Dry Red Wine

2 T Tomato Paste

16 oz Lean Ground Beef

1 Bay Leaf

1 clv Garlic (Finely chopped)

1 Celery rib (Finely chopped)

1 Carrot (Finely chopped)

1 small onion (Finely chopped)

2 oz Unsmoked Pancetta (Finely chopped)

2 T Olive oil

5 oz whole milk

Instructions

In a heavy saucepan, heat the butter and oil, and add the pancetta. Cook for about 5 minutes, until you have a nicely flavored fat base.
The vegetables should be very finely chopped, like the size of a grain of rice. If that is too labor-intensive, pulse them in a food processor. Then cook them with the bay leaf in the fat for 8-10 minutes.
Turn up the heat and add the ground meat. Cook it until just brown and not hard.
As soon as the meat starts to toughen, add the wine and reduce the heat. Now starts the reducing step.
Add the tomato paste, the pepper, and the stock. Simmer over a low heat for about two hours. As it gets reduced, thin it with the milk a couple of tablespoons at a time and keep going. This extracts all the flavors into the rich sauce.
When the last of the milk has been added and absorbed, adjust the seasoning as needed with salt, more pepper, or another pinch of nutmeg.
Serve hot over broad fresh pasta.

Notes

It is not uncommon to substitute veal for some of the beef. Home minced high-quality beef is more work, but it's worth using that instead of supermarket ground beef! The mirepoix should be chopped so finely that the vegetables are barely noticeable in the final sauce.

Source

Classic Food of Northern Italy