Quick and Easy Bolognese
When it comes to pasta dishes, you can find so many different shapes, sauce variations, and modern twists, but Bolognese has stood the test of time. I grew up eating it as a young lad, and it would be laced with jars of Bolognese sauce you can buy at the shops where you just need to pour it into cooked meat and mix through. We loved it, and as a working class family, it was cheap and affordable.
It wasn’t until I started becoming more interested in cooking and learning more about food that I wanted to make it all from scratch. Since those young years where I needed other people to cook for me, I have never had a Bolognese made with a shop-bought jar of sauce since. The last time I tried some many years ago, I found it was overly sweetened with sugar, and lacked any depth of quality or flavour, that I was surprised I liked it so much in the first place.
It really isn’t that difficult to make your own neither, and if you haven’t done it before. I really recommend you give it a try and enjoy the freshness of it, cooked in your own home. This recipe is really easy and quick and a perfect start to make it from scratch.
Recipe tips
The ingredients are minimal and although confit garlic takes time to prepare yourself, if you don’t have it readily available, you could substitute it with fresh garlic, but only use 2-3 cloves, or 6 cloves of fresh garlic would be to strong tasted.
The reason we heavily salt the pasta water to resemble sea water is because as the pasta cooks, it absorbs some of the liquid and seasons the pasta from the inside. Do not fear how much salt goes into the water. Start with one handful, taste the water, if it doesn’t taste that salty, then add another handful. Trust me, most of that salted water will be going down the sink after the pasta is cooked, not into your body, or you wouldn’t see me doing this neither.
If you are really sceptical about it then do not bother, but pasta tends to be flat to eat in flavour without it, and if you compared a side-by-side test, with salt, or without, you would notice the difference immediately in taste.
Allow the pan to gently simmer with the meat and sauce until it is thick and the tomatoes out of the tin are really soft. This really brings out the sweetness of the tomato and helps break down some of the acidity. When you taste the sauce, if you feel it is to acidic, you could always add some sugar to level that out.
Don’t get bogged down by the detail of the specific pasta mentioned. If you don’t have it available at the shop, use spaghetti, tagliatelle, linguine, pappardelle, or bucatini, which are similar pastas good for a meat sauce.
Quick and easy Bolognese
Ingredients
- 500 g Beef Mince Or if you prefer 250g mix of beef and pork
- 6 Cloves Confit Garlic
- 6 tbsp Olive Oil Use the oil from the confit garlic
- 2 400g Cans of Mutti peeled plum tomatoes
- 2 Banana Shallots Peeled, and finely diced
- 1 tbsp Worcestershire Sauce
- 2 tsp Red Wine Vinegar
- 600 g Fresh Fettucine 150g per person
- Grated Parmesan to garnish
- Sea Salt and Black Pepper
Instructions
- Heat up a large frying pan on a high-medium heat and add the olive oil.
- Fry the mince until browned off, seasoning with a little salt and pepper as it cooks.
- Add in the confit garlic cloves, and the shallots and fry down with the mince until most of the liquid has evaporated.
- Pour in the tins of tomatoes – and pour a little water into each tin, swirling it around to remove the tomato left in the tin. Pour this into the pan to.
- Add the red wine vinegar and the Worcestershire sauce and mix thoroughly, breaking up the tomato chunks with your chef spoon.
- Reduce the heat of the pan while it is bubbling, partially cover, and allow to simmer for 30minutes until it has thickened.
- Season the Bolognese with salt and pepper, tasting and adjusting as needed.
- Bring a large pan of water to the boil, heavily season the water with sea salt. It will taste similar to sea water but not as strong. Pour in your pasta and stir around with a fork for a couple of minutes until its almost cooked al dente.
- Drain the water through a colander and then add the pasta to the pan of Bolognese.
- Mix it all together until the pasta is cooked.
- Serve immediately and finish the dish with gratings of parmesan.
- There we have it… a quick and easy Bolognese to enjoy with the family!