One of my favorite hobbies to learn and read about is food, wine, and spirits. I am a sucker for old, long-forgotten cooking shows that can thankfully now be found in remote corners of YouTube. One of our kitchen closets is lined with numerous cookbooks collected through the years. The earliest examples belonging to my mother, still inscribed in her own hand with her contact info as she often loaned the books to friends.
Because my family knows of my love of cooking, when we get together for various events, I tend to be one of the primary worker bees in the kitchen helping prepare chow for the group. This has especially been true during our annual vacations to the islands with my brother and his wife.
On the most recent island excursion we found ourselves having a picnic lunch with an extended group of friends that would be coming by our place for dinner that night. While the group was planning the menu, one member of the group said they would prepare a marinara sauce for our dinner but then said how they love to toss browned ground beef into the sauce.
Never one to pass up some snark, I blurted out 'but then it would be a bolognese sauce' which caused an immediate silence.
"A bolo-what sauce!" exclaimed one which thus allowed me to channel my inner-Frasier Crane as I illuminated the group to the classification of Italian pasta sauces.
A bolognese sauce however is not quite a marinara sauce that one tosses meat into. In reality, a bolognese is a sauce comprised of numerous vegetables, meats, and liquids and employs both low and slow as well as high and fast cooking techniques. There is no singular, definitive recipe for bolognese which allows each preparer to adjust and tweak to personal taste however they see fit.
Below is my current interpretation of a bolognese. Its origins go back to an Italian woman named Ada who was the co-owner of a restaurant I worked in during my teenage years. Ada was fierce, precise, curt, and had an absolute maniacal attention to detail while cooking. She demanded excellence at every step of the cooking process, had an ever-watchful eye and a foolproof palate. She was the perfect person to introduce me to proper cooking and I will be forever grateful that our paths crossed.
First up - the ingredients:
- olive oil - 2 tablespoons or so
- butter - 4 tablespoons or so
- 1 large yellow onion, finely and evenly diced
- 4 carrots finely diced
- 4 stalks celery finely diced
- 4 garlic cloves very finely diced
- 4 to 5 ounces diced pancetta
- Kosher or sea salt
- Freshly ground black pepper
- 2.2 pounds ground meat (blend of veal, pork and beef – or just beef)
- 1 cup dry red or white wine
- 2 cups milk
- 28 ounces of diced tomatoes
- 1 cup beef stock
Now for what to do with all this great stuff.
I prefer to use a dutch oven so that I have plenty of depth to work with. Toss the pan over medium heat and once hot, add the oil and butter followed by the onions, carrots, celery and garlic. Toss in a nice dash of salt and a few grinds of pepper:
Give everything a good toss, then reduce the heat to medium-low. We want to sweat the vegetables for a good ten or so minutes, tossing every now and again. We do not want to brown the vegetables here, if you start to see browning, reduce the heat.
Once the vegetables are soft, it is time to add the meats. We are going to add the meat in four stages, pancetta first, then the ground meats one-third at a time.
Add the pancetta, give a good toss, then increase the heat to medium-high. We want to cook the pancetta through, ideally adding a bit of golden color to it, but your browning mileage may vary depending on how much moisture is in your pan. After about ten minutes, its time to add the first third of the ground meats.
By adding the ground meats in one-third increments, you are allowing the meat to cook while simultaneously letting the moisture in the meat evaporate. If you were to add all the ground meat in a single shot, the amount of moisture produced would overwhelm the heat in the pan, preventing effective evaporation, and you would more or less boil rather than sauté the meat.
When you toss in the first third, break up the big pieces and continue to stir and toss. Let the meat cook and when the steam from evaporation dies down, add and repeat the process with the second one-third portion of meat. Once complete with the final portion of meat, increase the heat to high and begin to stir and toss the meat as the sizzling intensifies.
What you are looking to do here is caramelize the meat. There is however a fine line between caramelized and burt, so keep a close eye and constantly stir. If you feel the meat is beginning to burn, reduce the heat. Caramelization will typically take 15 or so minutes, but again, stay vigilant.
Ultimately, you are looking to take the meats from this:
To this:
At this point, its vino time baby!!
Reduce the heat to medium and toss in at least a cup (perhaps a splash more). With your spoon, stir aggressively to deglaze the pan, pulling up any stuck bits on the bottom. The wine will cook out within a few minutes - you can tell this by smelling the steam rising from the pot. Immediately after adding the wine, there will be a definite alcohol burn in the nose, once the wine is properly reduced, there will be no more 'burn' in the nose.
After the burn dies, toss in the milk, diced tomatoes (and all juice), and beef stock. Give everything a good stir, bring just to the boil, then half-cover the pot, reduce the heat to the lowest possible setting and set a timer for four hours. Yeup, four hours, this is not a dish that is just 'whipped' up on a whim.
Give the sauce a stir every thirty or so minutes. After four gentle hours of braising the sauce will not be soupy, rather it will have the consistency of oatmeal:
Technically the sauce is 'done' at this point - flavors will be concentrated and married. If you give the sauce a taste, it will be intense, not weak in any way. As you taste, gauge the salt level - it should taste just a whisker on the 'salty' side but not in an unappetizing way. If the salt level tastes low, add a sprinkle, stir, and re-taste. If the sauce tastes too salty, do not fret, we will address that in the next step.
In reality, the sauce you just made is a bit too stiff and intense to eat on its own. To loosen and complete the sauce, grab another saucepan, place over medium-low heat, plop in a couple of tablespoons of butter, then ladle in some of the bolognese sauce. Now comes the fun part - stirring in nothing other than double or heavy cream (you do have a good cardiologist right?):
As to how much cream - that is entirely dependent on how much bolognese you are adding. I can only recommend that as you add cream, you constantly taste. What you are looking for is the point at which the cream mellows the intensity of the stock bolognese without washing out the flavor. Don't worry if you overshoot the cream, you can always add more bolognese. Once you achieve that flavor balance, congratulations, NOW your sauce is done!
You did make some pasta right?
Traditionally bolognese sauce is served with tagliatelle pasta, but any wide pasta will do. Go ahead and prepare, then drain and dump straight into the saucepan. Give it a good toss and transfer to a bowl.
One final step remains and this one is crucial. Grab a fine grater and top your masterpiece with oodles and oodles of Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese, the authentic Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese, not some domestic imposter. You have come this far, now is no time to take a short-cut, you must procure a wedge of the real thing, it is the King of Cheeses after all...
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