More Detailed Recipe

Bolognese sauce is probably the easiest pasta sauce to make, and there are an infinite number of different ways to make it. I love tasting the differences between other people's sauces to my own, and often I don't think theirs is any better or worse than mine, just... different. I've started thinking about Bolognese sauce as a food that exists in some sort of N-dimensional food-space, where the N variables consist of things like how much of each ingredient there is, how you chop them up, how long you cook them for, etc. For example, if I simmer the sauce for 30 minutes, I'll get a wetter, fresher, red sauce. Delicious. If I let it simmer for 5 hours, occasionally topping it up with water when it gets dry, I'll end up with a thicker, richer, dark red sauce. Also delicious. "How long should I simmer it" is only one of the many sliders in the control room of the average pasta-sauce-maker's brain (albiet one of the most impactful ones), and below I will attempt to detail the max and min of a few of these sliders. This way, I not only give you a "recipe for bolognese" but also a comprehensive mapping of the "Bolognese Zone" in the N-dimensional food-space.

Detailed Ingredients

• Onions 🧅 - To be honest, I always just put in 1kg because that's the size of the big bag at the shops. I'm sure the range here is enormous, but I don't know.
• Diced Tomato 🍅 - Between 2 and 5 400g tins.
• Carrots 🥕 - Between 0 and 4 carrots
• Meat 🥩 - I typically use 1kg Beef Mince. You can use a 1:1 Pork:Beef split if you want.
• Garlic 🧄 - 3 tbs of Crushed Garlic
• Olive Oil 🧈 - Just add enough to coat the vegetables. I only really add it because you can't caramelise onions without it.
• Salt 🧂 - To taste
• Pepper - To taste

For all herbs, I'm yet to hit an upper limit where the pasta becomes bad because there is too much. I've also made pasta when I've been missing one or two of them, and they turned out fine. I do think you need at least one of these three though, or it just won't taste Italian.

• Oregano 🌿
• Basil 🌿
• Rosemary 🌿

Optional Extras:

• Wine 🍷 - 0 to 1/2 a bottle. I normally use none, but that wine flavour can be nice too. Red or white, it doesn't matter. Stop lying to yourself and pretending you can tell the difference. The main difference in pasta sauce is that red wine makes the pasta an appetising dark red.
• Butter 🧈 - Between 0g and 250g of butter and honestly I don't think I could really tell the difference. I don't really think it's worth it.

Optional extras that you shouldn't tell your Italian friends about:

• Cheese 🧀 - Throw a handful of cheddar in there, and don't tell anyone. I dare you.
• Tomato Sauce - Tomato sauce is kinda like tomato paste + sugar, no?
• MSG - To taste. Similar to salt, if you can taste the MSG, you've added too much. One or two teaspoons is enough.
• Chilli Flakes 🌶️ - If you don't want to add a lot of pepper to add some spicy notes, you can use a few chilli flakes instead. If you can tell it's spicy, you've added too much.
• Sugar - I've added sugar before, and so long as you don't notice it's in there, it's fine. It's easy to completely ruin the dish by adding sugar though, and I'd personally rather just caramelise the onions more, and simmer longer to get a richer sauce.

Detailed Method

1. Chop vegetables:
   • Normally, I dice the onions, grate the carrots, and use crushed garlic. If you want, you can cut the onion into strips for fun. I've never tried doing anything other that grating the carrot, and probably don't want to. You want the carrot to essentially disintegrate so you forget you're eating carrot. If you chopped it finely, I think you'd find chunks of carrot in your mouth and be like "what the heck is this". Also just crush the dang garlic - no point slicing it or doing anything other than the bare minimum because it will also disintegrate.
2. Cook vegetables.
   • This is a major slider in the creation of the sauce, where the two extremes are leaving your vegetables almost raw, and caramelising them into a brown mush. Both are valid ways to cook them, depending on what you want for the sauce. If you want chunky vegetables that still have a crunch, you'll want to cook them less. This can add a bit of freshness to the sauce. If you caramelize them into sludge, you'll have a sweeter sauce, and you won't even be able to tell you're eating vegetables! I like to use a wide pan for cooking so that the moisture can evaporate and the vegetables don't turn into a soup. If the bottom starts to burn, I add a little water to deglaze.
3. Remove vegetables from cooker.
4. Cook meat.
   • Just throw the meat into the cooker by itself.
   • Use a wooden spoon, or whatever you're using to stir it, to break the meat into small pieces as it cooks. You don't want any big chunks.
   • When the meat has been browned, but isn't quite finished, I throw in all the herbs, salt, and pepper.
   • The big slider here is "how much should I cook the mince?". The extremes are: cooking it until it's grey and just cooked, or cooking it until it's almost burnt. While both these options will leave you with a servicable sauce, I heavily lean on the side of cooking it as much as possible and stopping right before the meat starts to burn. You get those tasty crispy chucks of meat, which adds a little extra flavour to the sauce.
5. Simmer.
   • Re-add the vegetables, the crushed tomatos, and anything else you want into the pan to simmer. Use a lid.
   • Another variable the experienced bolognese creator has access to is the moisture level. As the sauce simmers, the moisture will evaporate, but at any point just add more water to bring the sauce to your desired consistency.
   • As I previously mentioned, how long you simmer the sauce for has a huge effect on the final taste of the sauce. Cooking it for ~30 minutes will result in a fresher sauce, but I've simmered mine for ~6 hours before, resulting in an incredibly dark and rich sauce you also might enjoy.
6. Pasta cooking.
   • Salt the damn water. Use far most salt than you'd think. It makes the pasta taste way better.
   • Cook the pasta al dente damn it. When cooking pasta, there is a ~2 minute window when the pasta goes from slightly crunchy to a-little-too-soft. You want to hit this sweet spot. It's really not hard, but if you don't know, just take a piece of pasta out and eat it every 2 minutes to make sure you get it out when it's perfect.

Optional Story

My Dad is Italian. He has his own (similar) version of this sauce that he's made hundreds and possibly thousands of times over his life. Consequently, I think this bolognese sauce is the single food I've consumed the most of over MY entire life. I can't remember how I learnt how to make this, but I think over ~20 years living in the same house, I unconsciously learned most of the method through imitating my Dad and slowly accumulating tips from him. Then I started cooking it a lot for myself, and I tweaked a couple variables for reasons like: "I can't be bothered buying tomato paste because I'm a cheapskate" and "let's replace this red wine with white cask wine because I'm a cheapskate", etc.