So it dawned on me the other day that my last recipe for ramen pasta salad was completely vegetarian – it could have even been vegan if I was more selective in soy sauce brands. Vegan! This will never do. I head straight to the butcher shop.
Nom nom nom.
Today’s project is a classic Bolognese sauce (pronounced bo-lo-nay-zee), which includes three different kinds of meat to soothe my carnivorous soul after my previous foray into pasta salad. Now we all have a weekday meat sauce/cafeteria spaghetti-type meal that generally involves around three steps:
Step 1: Brown one pound of ground beef
Step 2: Dump in one can of tomato sauce
Step 3: Eat with noodles
This is generally about the extent of my cooking during the workweek. If I’m feeling particularly energetic I might throw a frozen loaf of garlic bread into the oven as well. Or even open a bag of salad. But Bolognese is actual cooking – and involves many techniques, knife skills, and a whole lot of time. This will also make a crap-load of sauce, so can be stretched over several days of good eating.
What we’re used to as far as meat sauce goes is usually a medium-thick tomato sauce with meat in it – this is far more complex, and far less tomato-y. The meats are:
½ pound of ground beef (this is ground chuck)
½ pound of ground veal (I know, I KNOW – don’t make me feel worse about it)
¼ pound of pancetta (dice finely)
The variations of Bolognese are too numerous to count – so many that the Accademia Italiana della Cucina (kind of the governing body of Italian cooking) produced an “official” recipe to define once and for all what Bolognese means. The ingredients are: beef, pancetta, red or white wine, carrots, celery, onion, tomato paste, milk, olive oil, salt, and pepper. It is always served with a wide flat noodle (never spaghetti!), and can be topped with cheese. They allow a variation that includes porcini mushrooms. That’s it – simple humble Italian cooking.
Using this authentic, legal recipe as a guide, I’m diving in with my own fairly minor twist on it. One of the twists? Veal. Yes, it makes me uncomfortable, but no I am not a monster – just a lady who likes to cook and eat. I’ve only ever ordered veal twice in my life – once in Rome, where I just had to try the Saltimbocca and they didn’t offer a chicken variation, and once in a Bolognese at a fancy Italian place in North Carolina. Can you make this without veal and the squicky moral implications? Sure. But: my blog, my recipe, and I’m putting some veal in here. The only other twist besides some rearranging of amounts will be garlic, because I NEED to put garlic in there. I can’t NOT use garlic.
We start with a mirepoix, or soffrito – finely diced carrot, celery, and onion sweated then sauteed slowly in olive oil. This is kind of a building block of lots of cuisines. I’m more of an onion-garlic-oil kind of girl, but this sauce will be chunkier and a little sweeter than what I’m used to. Here I show off my knife skills:
And here are the rest of the ingredients:
(Why do you have a tube of M&S tomato paste when you live in a small city in the southern part of the United States? Well when I was in London they had these big glorious tubes for 59p. and here you can only get the little metallic tasting cans, or the little tubes of fancy stuff for $3.49, so I stocked up. Tomato paste in a tube is brilliant and I don’t know why we haven’t caught up with the rest of the world on this yet. When you only need a tablespoon, it’s pretty wasteful to open a whole can. This recipe calls for a lot more than that, so go ahead and buy the can.)
So to begin, heat two tablespoons of olive oil in a large pan or pot – you will need a lot of room for this. Slowly and gently heat the chopped vegetables until they start to release some of their moisture.
Then turn the heat up slightly and sauté – add more olive oil if you want – you don’t what this to stick or brown. Stir frequently until the onions become translucent. Add the garlic right at the end, because it will burn and stick in a flat second if you aren’t careful. Then add your meats – ground beef, veal, and pancetta. Stir and brown all the meat. This will take about ten minutes.
Add the wine – the official recipe calls for a half cup, but that’s hardly worth opening a bottle for. Use a full cup. Heck, use more. I prefer a strong red for cooking – this is Merlot. Let it boil for a few minutes to reduce a bit, then add a little more than two cups of beef stock – again, not official, but again, my blog. Stir in about half a cup of tomato paste to start – remember this is not a tomato sauce with meat in it; this is a meat sauce with some tomato flavor. This goes against all of my instincts. Salt and pepper to your heart’s content, cover, set at the barest simmer, and let it go for 60 to 90 minutes. Or if you have a bitchy fussy stove like me, turn it on and off every 10 minutes or so to keep it from burning. This involves much running up and down the stairs, which I will count as exercise.
Then skim the fat – I have yet to find a recipe that recommends this (and I have read…well about 10), but ground beef and veal produce alarming amounts of grease. I remove around a cup and a half and it’s still pretty greasy. That can wait.
Slowly heat a cup of milk until hot but not boiling (I use whole milk here, because that’s what I have in the fridge). Use 2% if you want, or half-and-half. Don’t use skim milk. Skim milk is gross. Also milk fat helps keep the meat from clumping. Add the hot milk slowly so it doesn’t curdle or separate. Continue to simmer covered for another 45 minutes to an hour, to let it thicken.
45 minutes later, it is still not as thick as I’d like. It’s still a little greasy on top, and will require further skimming. But the taste… Ooooohhhh. My-oh-my this is a delicious meaty sauce. Soooo beefy. Personally I’m used to a more tomato-y flavor, but oooohhhh. The widest flattest noodle I had on hand was linguine, but I did have a chunk of parmigiano reggiano cheese in the fridge (the real stuff).
Hell of a lunch, y’all. That was one hell of a lunch.
illdothedisheslater 