Recipe – Sunday Supper Bolognese
When I was a kid, a staple dinner in our household was spaghetti with meat sauce. We aren’t Italian, so this was no slow-cooked ragu made from fresh Roma tomatoes, scented with oregano and seasoned with the sweat from a loving Nona’s brow. This was a jar of Classico tomato sauce cooked with ground beef. And it still stands out as one of my favorite childhood dinners.
When I first read about classic Italian bolognese, though, the idea of it stuck into the back of my brain and wouldn’t let go. I have about a million kitchen-related ideas a day, and many of them are forgotten as soon as they appear, but this one, it kept popping back up. I wanted a silky, meaty, slow cooked sauce, something I could make a huge batch of, to freeze for back-up meals on dark, cold winter nights, something that would make my kitchen smell incredible on a cozy weekend afternoon. After years of dreaming about this (I can be kind of lacking in motivation sometimes), I finally got my bolognese on this weekend.
Bolognese, or ragu, comes from the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy, a region known for its rich sauces. Traditional ragu is often made from a mix of beef, veal, and pork, and doesn’t usually contain a lot of tomatoes. The sauce is a mix of meaty stock and milk, with a hint of tomato. My version is much more of an Italian-American style ragu. I used only beef, because I have a freezer full of it, and a bit of bacon for flavor. And it’s very tomatoey. In a delicious, delicious way. The final result might not be particularly authentic, but it is exactly the smooth, luxurious pasta sauce I dreamt of. And it was supremely satisfying to spend a weekend afternoon letting it bubble away on the stove while I curled up on the couch, feeling the beginnings of Autumn’s crispness in the air.
You can make this with fresh tomatoes if you have a bunch on hand: Just make a basic tomato puree, first, by blanching the tomatoes and running them through a food mill. I decided to use canned tomatoes, because I appreciate their consistent texture and flavor, and because it’s much easier.
Sunday Supper Bolognese
- 3 strips of thick cut bacon
- 2 tablespoons butter
- 1 leek
- 2-3 sticks celery
- 1 large carrot
- 2-3 cloves of garlic
- 2 teaspoons dried oregano
- 1 teaspoon dried thyme
- 1/2 teaspoon red pepper flakes
- 1 pound ground beef (or a mix of beef, pork, and veal)
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 1 cup red wine
- 1 cup whole milk
- 2 28-ounce cans of crushed tomatoes
Heat a large dutch oven or soup pot over medium heat. Cut the bacon into small pieces and add to the pot. Cook, stirring frequently, until the bacon is almost crispy and has released some of its fat. Use a slotted spoon to remove the bacon to a paper towel-lined plate.
Slice the leek in half lengthwise, then into quarter inch slices. Rinse the leek pieces to make sure any remaining sand or dirt is cleaned out. Cut the celery and carrots into a small dice. Return the pot back to the heat, and add another tablespoon or two of butter, depending on how much fat the bacon has released (you should have about 2 to 3 tablespoons of fat in the pot). Add the leek, celery, and carrot, and cook, stirring occasionally, until the vegetables begin to soften. Mince the garlic and stir it into the pot, along with the oregano, thyme, and red pepper flakes.
Add the ground beef to the pot, and stir, breaking the beef up with a spoon. Stir and cook the meat and vegetables together until the beef begins to lose its color and become brown all over. Add salt, and return the bacon back to the pot, stirring to combine. Stir in the wine and milk, and allow to cook for about a minute, stirring so everything is well mixed. Then stir in the tomatoes. Combine well, and raise the heat a bit. Bring the sauce to a boil, then lower to medium-low and let the sauce simmer.
Cook the sauce for at least an hour. I cooked mine for two hours, and while it was perfectly tasty after the first hour, the second hour gave it enough time to soften and blend, for the flavors to develop and become deeper, and for the whole thing to become way better than ground beef mixed with jarred spaghetti sauce.
This is another great end-of-summer recipe, one that combines the summery flavor of tomatoes with the heartiness that the colder weather demands (well, it would, if we were really having colder weather…). And it freezes wonderfully. I separated the remaining sauce into two-cup portions in plastic freezer bags, and froze them on a baking sheet overnight. (Freezing them on a baking sheet allows them to lay flat, making for a much easier to store package in a crowded freezer.) And I can’t wait to pull them out for instant dinners on the cold winter nights to come. This would be great, obviously, served over pasta, but also served over polenta, or mixed into lasagna or a baked pasta dish. I love it when a few hours of a work on a summer weekend can yield multiple meals for the future.
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