Pasta Bolognese
Serves 3-4 normal(ish) appetites.
Ingredients:
1 tbsp. vegetable oil
3 tbsp. butter
2⁄3 cup chopped onion
5 cloves garlic, minced
scant cup celery, chopped
scant cup carrot, chopped
¾ pound ground beef (I use half chuck and half veal when available)
salt
fresh ground pepper
1 cup whole milk
1 cup dry white wine
whole nutmeg
1 14 oz. can chopped tomato
1 ¼ to 1 ½ pounds pasta
The Beta:
In a dutch oven or large pot, saute the onions and garlic on medium heat in the vegetable oil and butter. When the onions are soft and translucent, add in the celery and carrots and stir to combine.
The ground beef, a generous pinch of salt, and a few grindings from your pepper mill go in next. Brown the meat completely, making sure to break it up as much as possible. Once the beef is cooked, pour in the milk, and continue to stir with the heat still set on medium.
Once the mixture has combined to a similar consistency (roughly five or ten minutes), pour in the wine and allow the sauce to simmer for another ten minutes (ish). Last, grate a small amount of nutmeg into the sauce (⅛ tsp.), and stir this in along with the can of tomatoes. When the sauce returns to a simmer, decrease your heat by about half, or until it barely bubbles at all. Check your salt content at this point, adjust if necessary, and leave the sauce uncovered to do its thing.
Let the sauce cook for several hours. You want all the flavors to really sink in, and you can’t really over do it as long as the heat is low enough to not burn the bottom. Check on it every hour or so—taste for salt content and add water if it begins to dry out. Serve with your choice of pasta (hopefully fresh), and top with Parmesan (the good stuff). Tip: When serving, portion your noodles out in individual bowls, ladle the sauce on top, then use tongs to spin the noodles and sauce together. This will help you get more even portions of noodles and sauce with a better ratio as well.
Savory Sauce Calls for Quality Carbs:
Don’t make me slap that plastic bag of pasta out of your hand! There’s a reason you don’t taint a nice glass of whiskey with coke or a perfectly-cooked, medium-rare rib eye with A-1—and when you’ve spent five hours honing a Bolognese sauce, the last thing you want to do is turn it into a meh meal with cheap pasta. Fresh pasta takes a lot of extra work, but it’s totally worth it. It’s the same difference you’ll find between a homemade tortilla and one out of a bag: better texture, a more natural flavor, and the bragging rights that come with doing something the more challenging way. And just as a fresh tortilla can make a taco, the fresh pasta may be even more key to this recipe than the sauce.
If you still aren’t convinced, consider this the number one reason to take an extra hour in the kitchen: Fresh pasta is going to make the people you serve feel that much more cared for. We want the people who gather around our table to feel like they have escaped the stress of life for an hour or two, swept away in pasta bliss the same way you get caught up in a page-turning book. Of course, you can’t spend five or six hours in the kitchen seven days a week—but when you have the opportunity, the aim for your food should always be to tug at the heart strings. Imagine the last great meal you had with a few friends, so caught up in the food that all you heard were the clinking of silverware and those mmms of affirmation. In moments like this, one of our friends always sort of subtly slips in, “It’s emotional.” And I don’t think there’s a more perfect way to describe it. The food is so good that you have these unexplained, ooey gooey feelings rise up in your chest—this shared joy of getting to experience something so perfect for a short period of time. When I asked her recently where that saying came from, she said it was the only way she knew how to describe what she was feeling during an especially euphoric meal. If you want this Bolognese to capture your guests, like sweet music played on their taste buds, fresh semolina pasta is the go-to beta.
Our ratio for pasta is 200 grams all-purpose flour, 80 grams semolina flour, 5 egg yolks, 2 whole eggs, and a pinch of salt. This changes with egg size, so reserve your leftover egg whites in case your dough is too dry. You want it to be about the consistency of play dough. I’m not going to go into the specifics of making pasta here, but you can easily find a how-to video online and use our recipe with the techniques you find. And if you want to make this recipe, but you’re not ready to tackle fresh pasta, just spend a little extra and get a nicer dried pasta—these are easily found at a store like Whole Foods or Central Market.
Beautiful Bolognese:
I adapted this recipe from Marcella Hazan, which is largely the same with the exception of the garlic and veal we added. Mostly, I wanted to share my experience with making this dish for people less versed in this kind of cooking. Sometimes I feel like recipes assume we’re all kitchen educated, and often you’re left to fill in the gaps for yourself if the recipe doesn’t flat out explain everything.
If you look at both recipes, you’ll notice some differences in the amount of carrots, onions, and celery. This is because I chopped up whole carrots, celery stalks, and half an onion, and I wasn’t going to throw away the excess. Two whole carrots, for example, measured just under a cup. So instead of putting chopped carrots in a small plastic container, I just dumped it all in. You can’t throw ingredients in willy nilly like this when you’re baking, but it’s perfectly acceptable here to ad lib. Maybe this is well understood in your kitchen, but in case it isn’t, feel free to break the rules. I’ve made this recipe twice now, measuring pretty carelessly both times, and each resulted in the same delicious Bolognese sauce.
One thing I would like to play with next time is additional garlic and nutmeg. I just happened to have whole nutmeg to shave into the sauce, but I can’t say I recognized the flavor in the sauce’s final form. An additional note: Because you don’t drain the fat off of your ground meat, this sauce can be pretty greasy. The first time I made it with 50/50 chuck and veal, and the fat content was perfect. The second time, however, I used 50/50 chuck and ground pork (the market was out of veal), and the end result was a gross amount of fat floating on top. No problem—we used a ladle to spoon a large amount of this out, and we even used some of it in our pasta water when cooking our noodles. The photo above shows what our pot of sauce looked like after pulling the fat off the top.
A last and final side note on buying your meat: Always talk to your butcher when you’re looking for a specific quantity. I asked for veal at Central Market, and the butcher took already-packaged veal, opened it up, and gave me the exact quantity I needed. I wasn’t intending for him to do this—I didn’t even know they would do this. Fortunately Central Market is freakin’ awesome—I feel like I learn a new reason to love this store every time I go.
Carbs for your carbs: Sliced baguette with olive oil, salt, pepper, fresh rosemary, and a generous amount of minced garlic. Bake at 400 until golden—it’s emotional.