Ragù Bolognese is the undisputed king of meat sauces, and this is the best way to make it.
Get Recipe: The Best Slow-Cooked Bolognese Sauce
If there’s one thing I miss most about New York (aside from the pizza, that is), it’s the cold, snowy winters. Not just because I love the cold and I love snow days (I do!), but more because those cold, frosty days make those meaty, slow-cooked, rib-sticking winter dishes all the more delicious. And there’s no dish meatier, more rib-sticking, or more satisfying to make than a big pot of ragù Bolognese. It’s an almost Pavlovian reaction for me: as soon as I see the first snowflakes of winter, my feet start working their way towards the butcher counter, my arms reach for my biggest Dutch oven, and my fingers make a beeline for that wooden spoon (how to let all three do this at the same time is something that my brain has yet to work out).
It’s the kind of dish that I make in vast quantities, jar up, and ship off to family members. The kind of dish that I’ll taste for seasoning, then taste again, then again, and perhaps one more time to be sure, and before I know it, I’ve eaten a couple servings of it straight out of the pot and ruined my appetite, only to discover that nope, my appetite for Bolognese is still alive and kicking once it hits the dinner table.
Let’s get one thing straight off the bat here: when I say ragù Bolognese, I’m talking true ragù, the slow-cooked meat sauce that is almost entirely composed of meat with just a small amount of wine, stock, and tomato or dairy to bind it together. That “spaghetti Bolognese” you might get in Little Italy or a U.K. pub made with ground beef simmered in Marinara sauce may be tasty, but it’s an entirely different beast.*
* Of course even saying “true ragù” is fighting words. Depending on whom you ask, whether it’s a cook in Bologna or The Silver Spoon cookbook, recipes will vary widely, though all will agree that the sauce should be meat-forward, with only minor extra constituents to bolster—not distract or compete with&mdahs;that meat.
My love of Bolognese all started back when I was a line cook at No. 9 Park, Barbara Lynch’s flagship Northern Italian-inflected New American restaurant in Boston. One of my jobs every morning all through the winter was to pull out the giant rondeau that fit over 4 burners and make a batch of ragù Bolognese for the next night’s service (we always let it sit at least one night in the walk-in for better flavor). I’d carefully brown three different types of ground meat while sautéing onions, carrots, celery, sage leaves, and chicken livers in a separate pan. I’d mix the two together, then simmer them all down with a mixture of veal and chicken stock, milk, wine, and just a touch of tomatoes.
A few hours later it had reduced to a velvety smooth sauce so rich and hearty that only the fattest swaths of fresh pappardelle or tagliatelle could stand up to it.
Over the years I’ve been tweaking and refining that recipe, testing out every variable I could think of to improve its flavor and texture (or, if you prefer, align them a bit more with my own personal tastes). The result is that I’ve come up with a number of variations on the theme, including this No-Holds-Barred Lasagna Bolognese and another version that’s going to appear in my cookbook, which comes out next year.
More recently, I got to thinking: I discovered that the oven is the best way to make a rich, full-flavored, slow-cooked tomato sauce. What if I were to employ that same technique with my Bolognese?
What if, indeed. But let’s start at the beginning.
Meet Your Meat
Like I said, Bolognese is a meat sauce, and as such, our choice of meats is one of the most important elements. At No. 9 Park, Lynch liked to use a combination of very coarsely ground veal, pork, and lamb. Why? Veal is rich in gelatin but low in flavor. It gives the finished sauce a silky, smooth texture. Pork is high in fat with a moderate amount of flavor. That fat emulsifies nicely into the finished sauce. Finally, lamb has a ton of flavor, but a rather coarse texture. By combining all three, you get a mixture that’s flavorful, fatty, and silky—just like you would in, say, meatballs or meatloaf.
But I always wondered: veal is pretty bland (not to mention expensive and difficult to find). Is there a better way to get both gelatin and flavor into the mix? I knew that if I got rid of it, I’d have to find an alternative source of good gelatin. This was compounded by the fact that while the original recipe uses gelatin-rich veal bone stock, I pretty much never have anything but chicken stock at home, and I’m not about to spend a day making a rich white veal stock for a recipe that already takes four hours on its own.
I tried following the exact same recipe replacing the veal with ground beef and using 100% chicken stock. The flavor was indeed improved, but the sauce lacked a bit of its classic silkiness. The solution? Just add that gelatin in on its own:
Six full packets of gelatin bloomed in thin store-bought chicken stock brought enough body to the mix that texture-wise, it was an improvement over even a veal stock-fortified version, while the ground beef was an improvement in flavor. Pancetta, an ingredient common in many ragù recipes out there, also improved the sauce.
What advantages does pancetta offer over plain old ground pork? Well aside from the subtle spicing it comes with, cured meat products are a much more concentrated source of glutamic and inosinic acids. Glutamic acid—available in stable solid commercial form as MSG powder—is the organic compound found in cured meats, cheeses, seafood, and the like, that’s largely responsible for making things taste umami (aka savory), while inosinic acid acts as a sort of back-up singer, increasing glutamic acid’s effects.
I tried incorporating the pancetta in various ways, including grinding it in a meat grinder, finely chopping in a food processor, and going with simple dice. The third method was the easiest, and that diced pancetta melts away into the sauce as it cooks anyway.
In the original No.9 Park recipe, the meat is cooked in a separate pan from the vegetables before being added together. This kind of compartmentalized cooking is pretty common in the restaurant kitchen, as cooking like with like—meat with meat and veg with veg—gives you a bit more immediate control over exactly how much those ingredients are cooked, particularly when working in large batches.
Generally I’m not a fan of retaining unnecessary restaurant techniques for home use, but in this case, it works well, particularly since I like to make my ragù in large batches.
While my meats are cooking on the stovetop, I sauté diced onions, carrots, and celery in a combination of rendered pancetta fat and butter along with some minced garlic, parsley, and sage. As soon as the vegetables are tender, I add it all to the pot of cooked ground meat.
De-livering Liver
This takes us to what many folks who have tried Barabara Lynch’s recipe would consider the key element. The, er… Barbara Lynchpin, if you will (sorry): chicken livers. It’s an ingredient that Pellegrino Artusi recommended in his 1891 cookbook Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well, one of the first printed recipes for ragù Bolognese, though its use doesn’t make it into many more modern recipes.
Either way, there’s one thing that’s undeniable: liver adds flavor and depth to the finished sauce, and it does it in a way that sits in the background. Nobody who tastes the sauce would ever suspect that there are livers in it—unless they happen to bite into a chunk of one, that is.
In the restaurant, I’d carefully clean and trim the veins and connective tissue from each liver before finely chopping them all by hand. These days, I find it way easier to just leave them as-is and blend them into a smooth purée using an immersion blender. Not only does it save me from having to painstakingly clean the livers, but it also gets rid of those unpleasantly liver-y chunks of liver in the finished dish.
Liquid Refreshment
Now we get onto the actual heart of the simmering step, and it’s quite possibly the most contentious element in any recipe for ragù Bolognese: the liquid. Do we use wine? If so, white or red? What about milk? Does it really keep the meat tender? Okay, how about tomatoes? Do they have any place in a ragù?
I can’t answer any of these questions in a valid way from an epistemological perspective, but I can tell you what I’ve found produces the best end results based on years of testing, reading, tasting, and researching.
First off: the wine.
Here’s the real shocker: It makes almost no difference whether you use red or white. Just as when blindfolded, many casual drinkers* can’t identify white wine from red, so long as you’re starting with something that’s dry and relatively oak-free, after a long cook in a pot of sauce, that starting color of the wine has very little impact on the finished flavor of the dish. Even more surprisingly, it actually doesn’t make much difference in color either.
* Or even experts, as some not-particularly-scientific studies have shown.
Whether you go with red or white, wine is an essential element to flavor, adding just the touch of brightness and acidity needed to balance out the heaviness of the meat.
Tomatoes are the other acidic element in the mix. The Silver Spoon‘s classic recipe calls for no other liquid than some tomato paste and water or stock to thin it out. I vastly prefer to use whole canned peeled tomatoes (preferably high quality ones like imported Italian D.O.P. San Marzanos). Starting with whole tomatoes gives you better flavor and more control over how concentrated they get in the finished dish. It’s kind of like the difference between fresh squeezed orange juice and orange juice concentrate. You’d only ever select the latter out of convenience.
Given that the sauce is going to be simmering for hours, whole tomatoes (that I purée in the can) give better flavor.
Next I add the gelatin-enriched stock, which forms the bulk of the liquid. As that stock reduces, it becomes more and more intense in both flavor and texture.
And now up to the most controversial element: dairy.
Okay, so it’s not that controversial. Almost all modern recipes for ragù Bolognese call for dairy in one form or the other, whether it’s milk or cream. What is controversial is exactly what effect that dairy has. Many sources claim that adding milk to the pot at the beginning of the cooking process will help keep the meat tender, though very few offer an explanation as to why.
The closest I could find to an explanation was this bit from Cook’s Illustrated:
Why does milk make meat tender? Browning adds flavor, but it also causes the protein molecules in ground meat to denature. As the proteins unwind, they link up to create a tighter network and squeeze out some of the water in the meat. Long simmering allows some of that liquid to be reabsorbed. But if you skip the browning and cook the meat in milk (or any other liquid) at the outset, you limit the temperature of the meat to about 212 degress. As a result, meat cooked in milk does not dry out and toughen but remains tender.
There are some big science-y sounding words in there, but if you read it closely, it doesn’t actually make much sense. You’ll realize that at best, the section should probably be retitled “Why does meat cooked in any liquid stay more tender than meat that you brown?”
I prefer to get my science the old fashioned way: by some plain old experimenting. I cooked up a few batches of ragù using different ratios of liquids from 100% milk to 100% stock. Afterwards, I drained the solids out and tasted them two ways: first rinsed in stock to get rid of any excess milk stuck to the surface, and second rinsed in milk to get rid of any excess stock stuck to the surface. Turns out that the liquid you cook the meat in has absolutely no bearing on how tender the end result is. Meat cooked 100% in stock is indistinguishable from that cooked 100% in milk, provided its surrounding environment at the time of tasting is the same.
That said, adding milk to the cooking liquid and letting it reduce does have an effect on the finished flavor of the ragù (provided you don’t drain and rinse the meat, that is), giving it a more rounded profile and silkier texture. Perhaps it’s the silkiness of the liquid in your mouth that tricks some people into believing that the meat itself is more tender?
Either way, it’s clear that adding milk is a good thing.
How Now, Browned Cow?
And now we get to the most crucial phase of the process: the long cook. If you take a quick look back at that passage from Cook’s Illustrated, they do make one good point: browning meat toughens it far more than simply simmering it. But we also know that browning adds flavor, right?
In fact, some very well-respected ragù recipes call for browning the ground meats until very brown, like the version that Mario Batali makes on The Chew. In that version, he cooks the meat until what he calls “beyond brown”. I’ve made that recipe (or variations close to it) a number of times and have even eaten what can be presumed to be the same sauce at two of his restaurants. It’s absolutely packed with flavor, but I simply can’t get over the dried nubs of meat you end up with when you brown ground meat past the last inch of its life.
Surely there has to be a way to get great browned flavor without having to reduce the tender meat to dry rubble?
In point of fact, the whole reason I was extra excited for Bolognese season to start this year was because of this slow-cooked tomato sauce technique I developed a few months back.
The concept is simple: rather than simmering a pot of tomato sauce in a pot on the stovetop, just transfer the whole thing to the oven. Not only does the oven deliver more even heat and better reduction with less mess, but it also creates delicious caramelized bits of tomato on the top surface of the sauce and around the edges of the pot which you can stir back into the finished sauce for richer, deeper, more complex flavor.
What if I were to do the exact same thing to my Bolognese? In theory at least, it should be able to provide plenty of that browned flavor through the browning of stray proteins and sugars stuck to the inside edges of the pot along with whatever small bits of meat were exposed from the top surface of the simmering sauce, all while keeping the vast majority of the meat submerged and therefore tender.
Don’t you just love it when your theories end up panning out in real life? By cooking down the sauce in the oven, scraping around the edges as it cooked, I ended up with a finished sauce that was packed with browned-meat flavor but was still silky and tender.
By the way, this is what your sauce should look like when it’s done. It’ll start out watery and milky looking, and as it slowly cooks down over the course of a few hours, that liquid will eventually reduce so far that it simply can’t emulsify with the released fat from the meat any more. When that fat forms a thick layer on top of ultra-thick sauce, you’re ready to continue.
Back at No. 9 Park, we’d throw the sauce into the walk-in refrigerator as-is to cool down, letting that fat solidify so we could then remove it and stir back in a measured amount when reheating each individual order. At home, I skim off and discard all but about one cup off the finished sauce—just enough to give it richness and flavor without tasting greasy.
Things are looking good, but we’re not quite finished yet.
We’ve already added some parsley into the mix when we were cooking the vegetables, but some fresh parsley added after cooking adds another dimension of herbal flavor (fresh sage at this stage ends up being overpowering). A good amount of grated Parmesan also increases the meatiness of the sauce while helping to bind it.
For some further binding power, I like to finish my sauce with a glug of fresh heavy cream. It not only makes the sauce, well, creamier, but also helps to emulsify it, allowing that extra cup of fat you retained to integrate harmoniously.
Check out that gorgeous sheen and luster!
Finally, we get to the final, secret ingredient. If you are from Bologna, now would be a good time to avert your eyes: fish sauce. Yes, fish sauce. I’m talking the salty Southeast Asian condiment made from fermented anchovies.
Hear me out. First off, from a pure flavor perspective it just makes sense. Fish sauce is absolutely packed with those glutamates and inosinates we talked about earlier. It brings an unparalleled meatiness to your finished sauce, and no, it will not make it taste like fish. Moreover, its place in Italian cooking is not really that far out of place. There are plenty of Italian dishes that call for enhancing meat with a bit of glutamate-rich seafood. Fermented anchovies are widely used in Southern Italian cooking, for instance. Not only that, but if we look to ancient Roman history, you’d find that fish sauce is not dissimilar to garum, the condiment of choice back then, made from—you guessed it—fermented anchovies.
Still can’t wrap your head around it? That’s okay. Just ask someone to tip a couple tablespoons into the pot while you aren’t looking. Your mouth will thank you, I promise.
So what do you do with a sauce like this? I mean, you’ll be tempted to hover over the pot and finish it off all by yourself with nothing but a spoon and maybe a glass of leftover white wine to keep you company, but if you want to make some friends and loved ones very happy, you’ll serve it up with the best fresh pasta you can make or buy, preferably a wide, thick shape like pappardelle (here’s a trick: buy fresh lasagna noodles and cut them into one-inch ribbons by hand). Ridged dry pasta like penne rigate or rigatoni will do as well.
Cook that pasta in some well-salted water (and whatever anyone tells you, do not make that water actually as salty as the sea if you want your pasta edible—the sea is much saltier than folks think it is), drain it, reserving some of the starchy liquid, then return it to the pot, add most of your sauce, thin it out with the pasta cooking liquid, and cook at a hard simmer for about 30 seconds until the sauce gets a nice pasta-coating texture.
An Italian might tell me that I’ve put too much sauce on this pasta, and they’re probably right, but I just can’t help myself: it’s that damn good.
This is the kind of sauce that not only delivers on the promise of deliciousness while you’re eating it, but also makes your entire house smell wonderful for the four to five hours it takes to cook and for days after you’re done. It’s totally intoxicating and addictive.
Actually, if you’ve got any comments or questions to make on this recipe, please forgive me if I don’t answer right away, as I’ve gone out to buy some ingredients to make another new batch. I’m totally serious. Writing this has made me hungry.
Get Recipe: The Best Slow-Cooked Bolognese Sauce Managing Culinary Director
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