The Key to Making Restaurant-Worthy Bolognese Sauce

You don’t need to go to fancy restaurants to get a good bolognese sauce. Learn how to make an authentic bolognese at home! Also known as ragu alla bolognese, this beautiful ragu sauce is a thicker consistency and is made of a hearty trio of meat flavored with white wine, San Marzano tomatoes, and soffritto.

This is one of my all-time favorite Italian recipes, for good reason! I hope you fall in love with this version as I have.

RECIPE: https://asimplepalate.com/blog/authentic-pappardelle-bolognese-ragu-alla-bolognese/

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Timecodes
0:00 – Intro
0:28 – What you need
3:58 – Make the sauce
11:28 – Make the pasta
12:52 – Serve

today I’m going to show you how to make delicious bologan sauce served with paperell pasta this is one of my favorite things to eat of all time so I’m so excited to show you how to make it and I can’t wait to eat it there’s a lot to go over so let’s get right into [Music] it so I thought it’d be helpful if went over the ingredient s just because there’s a little bit more involved in a ban sauce and it’s also helpful for me to have everything laid out with this recipe if you’re familiar with a regular tomato sauce or a Italian meat sauce this Bolan sauce is different than those so those are primarily focused on the tomato and this sauce is focused on the minced meat so that’s going to be the star of this sauce for the Meat part we’re going to be using a combination of beef and pork and then we also have pan petta might not be as easily available to everyone so it’s in a lot of authentic Italian bologan sauces but if you can’t find Panetta you can just leave it out it’s totally fine and then for the base of the sauce we’re going to flavor it with a Sao that is a vegetable base to a lot of Italian soups and stews and it just consists of carrot celery and onion today I’m going to be using a red onion which is pretty common in bologan sauces but you can also use yellow too and then then for the Tomato again it’s not going to be focused on the Tomato but there are tomatoes in the sauce we’re just going to use two cans um but I have here some different options that you can do so San Marzano tomatoes are going to be the best option to use and this is deop certified so this means that these are authentic s Marzano tomatoes so you can use those I understand that s marzanos can be pretty expensive so if you don’t want to you know pay an arm and a leg for this sauce you can just use uh a regular peeled tomato just use whatever Italian peeled tomato that you can find that’s quality or other Italian recipes like to use pada in this so I’m giving you kind of some options for the tomatoes then you’re going to need wine so I have this white wine left over from another recipe I used it in and in a lot of traditional Italian bologan sauces you’re going to find that white wine is the one that’s mostly used rather than red and that’s because a lot of Italians thought that the red wine was too tanic and too robust and the whole point of a bologan sauce is to let each ingredient shine and not have super overpowering flavors in it so you’ll find white wine is used a lot but I’ve made this recipe with red wine many times and it’s delicious so you can use whichever wine you have and then we have chicken broth so this is for the sauce getting really thick this is going to help it thin out a little bit and you can use water lots of Italians use just water um or homemade chicken stock or a beef stock we also have milk that’s used to make it a little bit creamier and it also helps tenderize the meat and then we have nutmeg which is very traditional in a lot of Italian banese sauces Just A Pinch adds a nice little kick of flavor and then we have tomato paste and lastly an ingredient that I like to add is just a Parmesan cheese rind I keep these in my freezer I have tons of them because I use so much parmesan and this is just my little way of adding even more flavor to the sauce you put this in and it just softens it doesn’t melt or anything and it just infuses really rich flavor into the sauce some Italians might yell at me for doing that but I don’t think it distracts from the flavors I think it only adds to the sauce a really beautiful flavor so that’s optional but I like to do it because it makes the sauce taste delicious so that’s one the ingredients I know it was a lot now let’s get into making the sauce so one of the first things we want to do is get the srio ready I like to have this ready before I start cooking the meat so with srto you want it actually to blend in completely with the meat you don’t want to know that vegetables are in the sauce I actually don’t really care for a bowlan sauce that has chunks of carrots and celery in it so I found that using a food processor is the way to go you’re just going to pulse it a few times and it makes the vegetables the perfect tiny pieces that you need where it Blends in with the sauce so we’re just going to pulse this a few [Music] times okay so that should be good so it’s tiny pieces but you don’t want to puree it we don’t want baby food we just want to chop it into really tiny pieces kind of like the size of the meat so the best pot to cook a Banes sauce in is going to be an enameled cast iron pot so I have I think it’s like a 64 can’t remember how big it is but it’s pretty big uh you can also use stainless steel pot too but I would definitely recommend the cast iron pot because it’s going to radiate a lot more heat and it’s just going to really rich in and thicken the sauce because of that heat so I have a little bit of butter melting in the pot and we’re going to add a little bit of oil and the butter just adds nice richness to the sauce but you can just use olive oil if you want and what we’re going to do is we’re going to add The Panetta and we’re only using just a little bit of Panetta this is a 4 oz packet and we’re going to first render the fat on The Panetta before we put the uh safo in so we want to cook The Panetta until it’s just slightly browned on the edges and we’re rendering off that fat and we’re using this uh portable burner today because it’s a little harder to film back in our range so this is definitely a little slower every burner is going to cook differently and the ranges of heat are going to be different too so your medium my medium on that thing is actually pretty hot so you might need to just gauge that but just keep it on a low medium heat cuz we don’t want to burn The [Music] Panetta all right so the Panetta is cooked cooked now we’re going to add the safo to this and I forgot to mention that I do like to add garlic to uh the safo I’m a huge garlic person but I didn’t include it today it is optional on the recipe on my blog it is not common in a lot of traditional Bolan sauces just because a lot of Italians think that the garlic is a little bit more distracting and flavor so it’s optional I like to add it just two to three cloves but I didn’t today cuz I don’t need anyone yelling at me so we’re just doing the onion celery and carrot and we’re just going to stir this in with the Panetta and we’re going to get a little pinch of salt that helps the onion sweat and flavor the vegetables too whenever you’re cooking a sauce like this you always want to salt as you go that really helps layer the sauce with the most flavor rather than just adding a pinch at one time it’s great to just layer the salt as you go and we’re going to cook this for about 3 minutes just until the vegetables soften a little [Music] bit now we’re going to add the beef and the pork use your spoon to break this up and you want to cook this until all the meat is [Music] browned now that the meat’s cooked we’re just going to add a little pinch of salt to flavor it and then we’re going to add the tomato paste and then we’re we’re going to add 1 cup of wine again it can be the red or the white I think that’s about a cup and this step we’re going to cook off the Tomatoe flavor on the paste and the alcohol in the [Music] wine this smells amazing seriously if you have never made homemade bologan sauce at home just wait until the aroma hits to your house because it is the most incredible smell ever next we’re going to add our tomatoes and what I did is I used my hands to crush these just because uh typically I use whole tomatoes in a lot of my sauces but in this I don’t want the tomatoes to be a focal point in the sauce I want the meat to shine through so we’re just going to break up the tomatoes into smaller pieces and you can also pulse them in a food processor too just so that we don’t have whole chunks of tomatoes in the sauce we’re going to mix that in with the meat and because this sauce gets really thick and Hearty we’re going to add some chicken broth to it and over time as the sauce Cooks if you feel like it needs a little bit more liquid you can add more broth or water whatever works and then we’re going to add a little bit of our nutmeg [Music] and our milk this again adds creaminess and tenderizes the meat just going to stir that together and I’m also going to pop in my parmesan rind and I’m just using a small one pop that in there mix everything together [Music] then we’re going to season with some salt little generous pinch and some black pepper now that the sauce is ready to cook we’re going to keep it completely covered while it simmers and I want this to be on a really low simmer the lowest that your stove uh top can do and that’s because this is going to simmer for 4 to 5 hours it needs a good amount of time uh to develop really deep flavor in this sauce stirring often just so that the bottom doesn’t burn you can set a timer my mom always did that growing up as she would set a timer and it was always the sauce timer whenever it went off we had to go stir the sauce so yep we’re going to let this cook and then we’ll toss it with some pasta later now while the sauce is cooking you might find some of the oil or grease collecting at the top I like to skim the extra oil off the top with a spoon and then put it in one of the Tomato cans I used for the recipe just to dispose of it okay so now the sauce is almost done which it smells amazing in the whole house we’re going to prepare the pasta the pasta shape that we’re using today is papelli and this is my favorite way to serve Bolan because this is a wider edged pasta shape so it can catch all that thick and Hearty meat sauce in it and tagl is also a popular choice too those are the two very traditional pasta shapes to serve with a bullin sauce some people might use spaghetti but I would say no to that because it’s too thin and it won’t really hold on to the meat sauce like it should so we’re going to use this and we’re going to cook the pasta in a well salted pot of water until it is alente and texture and that just means it has a little bit of a bite to it we don’t want it to be super soft because otherwise it’s going to kind of get a little mushy when we toss it with the sauce so the pasta is done but before I strain it I want to save some of this pasta water because we’re going to toss it with the bowan and the pasta later it has lots of starchiness in it and it adds a creaminess to the pasta and the bologan pasta water is such a great ingredient to use in so many pasta recipes so don’t ever get rid of all of it you always want to save a little bit just in case the dish dries up you can add a little bit more and it adds moisture back into the dish and some creaminess now we’re going to strain this and we’re going to get ready to toss it with the Banes so now that the sauce is done you can see that it’s reduced down a lot and it’s become really thick and just it smells so good now we’re going to toss this with the cooked pasta and you want to do this when this is hot I have this in a bowl but it’s just for looks so I typically would do this in another pan and just to keep everything hot whenever you’re doing a pasta like this you want to serve it right away so we’re going to do a couple nice generous scoops of Banes with the pasta and then a little bit of pasta water over top still hot and then we’re going to toss just until everything gets mixed together and now one of the most important ingredients when serving a bowan sauce is freshly grated parano regano this is going to add that beautiful cheesy flavor and it’s essential when you’re serving a good Bolan sauce so we’re going to do generous shading of this cheese over top and this is going to melt because this is freshly grated it’s going to melt beautifully in with the Banes just lost a big chunk in there and now we will toss this now I do have some fresh basil over here in a classic Bolan sauce a lot of Italians are going to say that it doesn’t need fresh herbs and they’re right it doesn’t need fresh herbs because it’s so delicious but fresh basil never hurt anyone in a dish it only adds just a subtle herb flavor to finish off at the end so I think it’s totally fine to add fresh basil but herbs are not really a thing in traditional Bolan sauce so we’re just going to toss this all [Music] together okay so Drew is here to taste test and oh my gosh thank you so much yeah it smells so good you can actually smell that white wine too I think that really is what makes this sauce smells so good and the tomatoes but I just think the white wine just sends an aroma through the whole house and I cannot wait to taste it I love it this is absolutely one of my favorite pasta dishes mine too and I love how thick the whole sauce is yeah it’s not running all over the place I know um it just has so it’s just has so much substance to it m yeah I agree I’m like a huge thick sauce person so right on call it love it delicious could eat this every single day and not get sick of it it’s the best sauce ever so I think we’re going to literally like a double portion for the family later a little goes a long way with the sauce but in my family we usually eat all of it in one dinner so yeah it’s it’s a no leftovers dinner for sure yeah but you don’t need to go to Italy to have a good bologan sauce you can make it yourself and this is really true to the typical recipes you would find in bolognia Italy they just probably would throw the parmesan rind out and um not do the fresh basil at the end but everything else is very traditional to a true bologan sauce it’s great to know how to make this recipe and everyone loves it so including us yes I love it yeah I’m going back for more and that’s how you make delicious bologan sauce at home we hope you love this recipe just as much as we do it’s seriously again one of our favorites of all time it’s so worth making at home and we’ll catch you on the next recipe [Music]