Bolognese sauce
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Bolognese sauce (ragù alla bolognese in Italian, also known by its French name sauce bolognaise) is a meat based sauce for pasta originating in Bologna, Italy. Bolognese sauce is sometimes taken to be a tomato sauce but authentic recipes have only a very small amount of tomato, perhaps a couple of tablespoons of tomato paste.
The people of Bologna traditionally serve their famous ragù with freshly made tagliatelle (tagliatelle alla bolognese). Less traditionally, the sauce is served with rigatoni or used as the stuffing for lasagne or cannelloni.
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[edit] Preparation
Recipes differ greatly from a very classic and time-consuming ragù alla bolognese to a much simpler and quicker sugo di carne (‘meat sauce’). A simple but authentic form of ragù alla bolognese may be made as follows.
- Prepare a soffritto of finely chopped carrots, onions and celery—of which a sautéed mirepoix is merely one example—and other aromatics in olive oil.
- Brown finely minced meat (beef flank and pancetta) in the soffritto. (As a short cut, one can use ground meat instead of minced, but the texture will suffer. Furthermore, such meat is rarely lean and the sauce is liable to be excessively greasy.)
- Add a half-glass of white wine and let it reduce.
- Add small amounts of tomato sauce and stock.
- Simmer very gently until the meat softens and begins to break down into the liquid medium. This may take upward of four hours, classically one to two hours is enough.
- Cream or milk is added about ten to fifteen minutes before cooking is completed.
The recipe issued in 1982 by the Bolognese delegation of Accademia Italiana della Cucina confines the ingredients to beef, pancetta, onions, carrots, celery, tomato paste, meat broth, white wine, and milk. However, different recipes, far from the Bolognese tradition, make use of chopped pork, chicken or goose liver along with the beef and/or veal for variety, or use butter with olive oil. Also, to make a richer sauce, prosciutto, mortadella, or porcini mushrooms can be added to the soffritto. Sometimes some fresh pork sausage meat (salsiccia) can be added to the minced meat.
[edit] Spaghetti Bolognese
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Spaghetti alla Bolognese,or Spaghetti Bolognese popular outside of Italy consisting of a meat sauce served on a bed of spaghetti with a good sprinkling of grated cheese: Parmigiano Reggiano, ‘Italian hard cheese’ or Cheddar.
In recent decades the dish, as spaghetti och köttfärssås, has become very popular in Sweden, especially among children. Spag bol or Spag Bog is also popular in the United Kingdom, where it has a reputation of being the only dish that students are able to cook when they leave home for university. In the United States, too, the term bolognese is often applied to a tomato-and-ground-beef sauce that bears little resemblance to ragù served in Bologna.
[edit] See also
[edit] Further reading
- Kaspar, Lynne Rossetto (1st Edition: September 21, 1992) The Splendid Table: Recipes from Emilia-Romagna, the Heartland of Northern Italian Food, Morrow Cookbooks. ISBN 0-688-08963-1
- Elaborate version of authentic Tagliatelle con Ragù alla Bolognese
