| Greg's ragù bolognese |
| Greg's home page |
| Cooking main page |
| Recipe index |
| Greg's diary |
| Copyright info |
| |
|
|
Ragù bolognese is a meat sauce much used with pasta—the typical dish is “spaghetti bolognese”. It's quite a complicated dish; here are some thoughts on making it.
| quantity | ingredient | step | ||
| 90 g | celery | 1 | ||
| 50 g | carrot | 1 | ||
| 250 g | onion | 1 | ||
| 150 g | smoked ham | 1 | ||
| 50 g | butter | 1 | ||
| 30 g | olive oil | 2 | ||
| 250 g | beef, minced | 2 | ||
| 250 g | pork, minced | 2 | ||
| 150 ml | red wine | 3 | ||
| up to 500 ml | beef stock | 4 | ||
| 70 g | tomato paste | 4 | ||
| 250 g | chicken livers | 5 | ||
| 20 | butter | 5 |
Coarsely chop the celery, carrot, onion and ham. This mixture is called battuto. I find it most convenient to mince the ingredients coarsely:
|
|
|||||||||
Note the coarse disk in the mincer.
Melt the butter and fry the battuto in it over a low heat. The result is called soffritto.
Put the soffritto into a pot in which the ragù will be cooked, add the olive oil to the pan and fry the meat in it until lightly browned.
Add the wine and continue cooking until most of the wine has evaporated.
It's almost impossible to avoid the meat sticking together. At the end of the time, it will probably look like this:
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
I take this mixture and put it through the mincer again:
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
It's very important here to use a coarse disk. If it's done more finely, the resultant texture is like shredded cardboard.
Put the meat, stock and tomato paste into the pot with the soffritto, bring to the boil and simmer for 30 minutes. Be careful with the stock: the mixture should be barely covered in liquid, which seems to have required between 200 and 500 ml in the past.
Meanwhile, fry the whole chicken livers in butter, let them cool and chop as finely or coarsely as you prefer. Depending on the dish, you may then add it to the ragù or use them separately, in lasagne al forno for example.
| Cooking home page | Recipe index | Greg's home page | Greg's diary | Greg's photos |
