(adapted from Anne Burrell.)
Serves 4 with lots of leftover sauce
Serves 8 if you double the amount of spaghetti
Ingredients:
1 large onion, cut into chunks
3 large carrots, ditto
3 ribs celery or a fist-sized celery root, ditto
3 cloves garlic
Olive oil for cooking, and olive oil for finishing*
Salt
2 lbs of ground meat (can be beef, pork, lamb, or a combination)
15 oz tomato paste
2 cups red wine
Parmigiano Reggiano
1/2 lb Spaghetti, fresh or dried
1) Put the onion, carrot, celery and garlic in a food processor and pulse it until it's very finely chopped (but not quite pureed). Heat some olive oil in a large wide pot and cook the vegetable mixture for about 20 minutes until soft and browned. Season it generously with salt.
2) Add your meat and cook it all until browned, about 20 minutes. Season again.
3) Stir in the tomato paste and cook another 5-10 minutes.
4) Add the wine and bring the mixture to a boil, allowing the wine to reduce by about half. This should take 15 minutes or so, but you can eyeball it.
5) Add about 3 cups of cold water-- enough so that the sauce looks like soup; about an inch of liquid above the meat-- and let it all simmer until it looks like sauce again. It should take about an hour. I did this process three times, and the more you add water and keep letting it reduce, the richer the sauce will taste.
6) About a half hour before you are ready to eat, bring some very salty water to a boil and cook your pasta. Drain the pasta, put it in a large serving dish, and toss it with sauce (you will probably only need 1/3 of the sauce you made and will have lots leftover). Serve it with parmigiano reggiano shaved on top, and some nice olive oil.
Chopped carrot, onion, celery, garlic
The above, browned
Plus meat
Plus tomato paste, wine, water; reduced
Plus cooked spaghetti
Plus plate, parmigiano, and a little spinach salad
Every year for my birthday we have a chili cook-off. This year, we had a lot of leftover ground meats and half-used open cans of tomato paste, so I thought a Bolognese would be a great way to use it up. The only downside is that I was already kind of sick of eating chili... and after hours of cooking, I was hit with the realization that I had kind of just made Italian-style chili. But don't get me wrong. It's good! In fact-- I will be so bold as to say it tasted as good as the Bolognese I had in Bologna. It's just a person can only eat meat sauce so many days in a row.
I think this recipe would be just fine after the first addition and reduction of water, but I pushed it to the ultimate because I had time. Though, for the hours that it's reducing, you really can go off and do other things.
Other notes: I used deer, lamb, and beef in my sauce. I had high hopes for an exciting gamey flavor, It basically just tasted beefy. So, truly, any meat can work in this, pretty much. I also used a combo of tomato paste and diced tomatoes. And the amounts of veggies could vary, too. Basically... this recipe takes lots of time, but the beauty is that it's adaptable to whatever you have on hand.
* BONUS FACT: There are lots of different types of olive oils, and they have different uses. Cheap extra-virgin olive oils should be used when you're cooking with heat, as they are not very delicate or flavorful, and when you cook oil to high heat it loses most of it's flavor anyway. Actually, there have been tests done that show how olive oil, canola oil, peanut oil, etc are pretty much indistinguishable in flavor after they've been cooked. SO...if someone gives you a fancy bottle of olive oil, don't waste it by cooking it! Use it for "finishing." Even though these olive oils are pricey, you won't use them in large quantities, and a bottle should last you a long time. Use fancy olive oil for salads, drizzling over the top of a finished pasta dish, or dipping. It is a really easy way to take your meals to the next level!
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