This recipe is part of the cooking curriculum for Cooking Italy, a cook along group that cooks mostly from Marcella Hazan’s Essentials of Classical Cooking. It’s a group of friends and food bloggers who want to seriously learn how to cook regional Italian cooking. If you are interested in joining, this group, go to Cooking Italy, and email me.

Today we visit Bologna, capital of the northern region of Italy, Emilia-Romanga, for the very best Bolognese sauce I have eaten so far. I only started making bolognese this year, and I’m now obsessed and curious about the variety of recipes I have found (I just saw a new one in the magazine La Cucina Italiana that I will have to try soon). But, of course today, we follow Marcella, who has yet to disappoint me.

I avoided making bolognese sauce for years. It’s my own fault. I admit that I had a complete misunderstanding of this sauce. Although my grandfather, Angelo Pomone, (who I was named after) was from Genoa, and my other grandfather was from Sicily, and everyone else in between Italy,  I had no real understanding of Italian food.  The main cooks in my life were from Naples, and that particular type of southern Italian food is what I was most familiar with. We didn’t eat “meat sauce.” Only Americans ate meat sauce, as my grandmother would opine, quite snootily.

How naive I was to look at Bolognese Sauce in the same way I looked at that kind of “meat sauce.”  If you are confused, stay with me, and I’ll explain. You have all seen, and probably eaten, a typical meat sauce with spaghetti. Chunks of ground beef, tomato, onion, and who knows what thrown together with some tomatoes for maybe an hour and thrown on pasta. You can even buy it in a jar. And, if I’m sounding Italian food snobby, please understand my very peculiar family who lived by food rules. Every Italian family has them, in America and especially in Italy. It’s the only “honor” my family exercised with full commitment. Any “sin” could be confessed and forgiven...except food sins, which were unforgivable. 

One of our strictest rules was that no one in the family would make a meat sauce or eat a sauce from a jar anywhere, not even to be polite. It would be unthinkable because it was viewed as the sign of not being Italian. It would be like eating wonder bread in a french bakery.  If a meat sauce would have been served at a large family gathering, it would look something like this. My Aunt Rita would start whispering, “what is this, who made this.” My mother would lean in and smell it, and ask where it came from. My grandmother would just make a terrible gesture and say, “americano.”  She was born in America, but she would do that.

My reaction would be a bit dramatic. I would probably cry real tears because meat sauce had bad memories for me. The only meat sauce ever served to me was by three babysitters on three separate unhappy occasions. I admit to you that I was known to cry when the food got messed up and the recipes altered. Food was the one thing I could trust inside a pretty crazy family. If you served me “baby-sitter meat-sauce,” I could have a break down at the table.   But no one ever served a meat sauce. It wasn’t done. My food world never got shattered.

Here today with a new set of eyes and a better culinary understanding of Italian food, I am presenting to you the quintessential Italian meat sauce of the world, and one I am very proud to serve, as it will bring you closer to Italian cuisine, where I still believe the other kind of meat sauce brings you further away.

I made homemade pasta to go with this, but never managed to get a picture of the two together. I didn’t even need the pasta. I could have eaten this out of the pot and been happy.

Now that I understand the genius of Bolognese sauce, I will no longer cry at the table.

I had to reset my thinking. I used to think of meat sauce as a tomato sauce with big chunks of meat and onion. While that might be true here in America, the Bolognese meat sauce is completely different. It’s a meat sauce with tomato, not a tomato sauce with meat.

Tomato sauce and meat sauce are distinctly different. When I want a tomato sauce, I want a fresh tasting, bright burst of flavor that is cooked for a very short time. The ragú (as the Bolognese call it) is a sultry, savory sauce sweetened by the soffritto of onions, celery and carrots and cooked forever, a minimum of three hours once the last ingredient has been added.

The result is that 30 minutes after a long preparation and and an all day slow cook, there was not one bite left, which is a shame because, of course it’s better the next day. Aside from using bolognese for a typical wide handmade pasta such as tagliatelle or papparadelle, you can top polenta, crepes or even rice with this delicious ragû. Since this is time consuming, but not difficult, make a double or even triple batch. You will regret it if you don’t.

It is perfectly served with tagliatelle pasta, which I attempted to make, but still ended up with a wider noodle, most often referred to as pappardelle. 

The Process

The soffritto is prepared mostly in butter with a little vegetable oil and this is already a departure from southern Italian cooking that does not use butter. Ground chuck is then added into this vegetable mix, followed by milk until it evaporates, followed by white wine until it evaporates. 

Soffritto means sub-cooked or under fried, because of the small amount of oil used often with butter to cook vegetables as the base of the dish. Onions, carrots and celery, also known as the “trinity” is the medley used in northern Italian cooking.

The idea is to slowly soften the onion without browning, and then add in the carrots and celery and allow them to absorb the onion flavor which will be mild and sweet, not harsh. Marcella uses a larger portion of celery and carrots than I’ve seen in many other recipes and I agree with her. I didn’t like my first bolognese sauce (by a prominent Italian cookbook author) because the taste was flat. Surprisingly, Marcella leaves out pancetta, frequently seen in other recipes, but the large addition of vegetables and a lower ratio of tomatoes makes her bolognese work. Marcella adds the milk to the meat before the wine, and uses white wine, not red wine that I’ve seen in many other recipes.

The hardest part of the cooking process is waiting patiently between steps, as the vegetables soften, the meat cooks, and the milk and wine completely evaporate. This is NOT a throw it all into a crock pot and go to work dish. Having said that, you could prepare the sauce and once the last ingredient has been added, move it to a crock pot and cook on low for the day.

The Pasta

As far as pasta goes, you can enjoy this with a store bought pappardelle, or you can choose to make the pasta above that is machine stretched, but hand cut. I’ve written about pasta several times, usually flavored, so I’ll repeat once again my method. It came as a shocking surprise that the method I came up with on my own, is the same as Marcella’s outside of her longer kneading period and my insistence on resting the dough. So I’m going to give you my pasta recipe and you can certainly use hers, as I do recommend this book to get every detail.

Recipe adapted from Marcella Hazan’s Essentials of Classical Cooking

(converted to a double batch) (red reflects my changes)

Bolognese Sauce 6-8 servings

2 T vegetable oil

6 T butter plus 2 T for tossing pasta

1 cup chopped onion

1 1/3 cup chopped celery

1 1/2 cup chopped carrot

1 1/2 pounds ground beef chuck mixed with salt and pepper before cooking

(meat should not be too lean, ask for neck portion of chuck)

Salt

Black pepper, freshly ground

2 cups whole milk

Whole nutmeg, 1/4 t

2 cup dry white wine

3 cups canned imported Italian plum tomatoes with juice, chopped

2 bay leaves

2 pounds pasta

Freshly grated parmigiano-reggiano cheese at the table

On medium heat, add oil, butter, onion, until translucent. Add celery, carrots, cook 2 minutes, stirring, not browning. Add meat, break up with fork, and when no pink color is showing, add milk.  Turn down heat to simmer, stirring frequently until milk has evaporated. Add nutmeg. Add wine, stirring thoroughly. Once wine has completely evaporated, add tomatoes, and simmer on very very low stirring every now and again. If sauce dries out, add 1/2 cup water a time.  Cook for a minimum of 3 hours. I think 4-6 hours is better.

Taste and season with salt, pepper.

Server over pasta.

Pasta (6-8 servings)

2 cups flour

4 eggs

Add one egg at a time to a center well of flour.

Scramble egg with fork incorporating flour. Add second egg.

Be prepared to add more flour if necessary. Knead for 8 minutes.

As you are kneading, dough  will become less sticky. 

Rest for 30 minutes covered with damp towel.

To make tagliatelle, cut into 1/4” strips.

Be sure to dry the pasta out for about 25 minutes before you roll it and cut it.

Follow instructions for rolling and cutting here.

Cooking Italy:  You may visit my friends on the Cooking Italy blog roll to see how they did with this dessert.  Next week, we will be making Pork Loin Braised in Milk, Bolognese Style, page 417.

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Key Words:   Bolognese Sauce, Cooking Italy, Marcella Hazan, Pasta,

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