Neapolitan ragù (ragù napoletano or ragù alla napoletana in Italian, rraù in Neapolitan) is one of the two most famous varieties of meat sauces called ragù. (The other one is the renowned Bolognese sauce popular worldwide.) It is a speciality of Naples, as its name indicates.
Like its equivalent in Bologna, the Neapolitan type is also made from three main parts: a soffritto, meat, and tomato sauce. However, a major difference is how the meat is used as well as the amount of tomato in the sauce. Bolognese version uses very finely chopped meat, while the Neapolitan version uses whole meat, taking it from the casserole when cooked and serving it as a second course or with pasta. Also, the soffritto contains much more onion compared to the Bolognese. Preferences for ingredients also differ. In Naples, white wine is replaced by red wine, butter by lard or olive oil, and lots of basil leaves are used where Bolognese ragù has no herbs. In the Neapolitan recipe the content may well be enriched with adding raisins, pine nuts, and involtini with different fillings. Milk or cream is not used, and a relative abundance of tomato sauce in flavour, in contrast to Bolognese use of a minimal amount, is preferred. The tomato season is of course much longer in Southern Naples than in Northern Bologna. Like the Bolognese, Neapolitan ragù also has quite a wide range of variants, the most well-known of which is ragù guardaporta (doorman's ragù).
It is interesting to note that Bolognese sauce (or, more often, a kind of tomato-and-ground-beef sauce named this way) is used with tagliatelle, which is a fresh egg pasta, in Italy, but outside of Italy for spaghetti, a dry southern pasta. In Italy the kind of ragù used with pasta types like spaghetti, bucatini, and ziti is always the Neapolitan one.
Neapolitan ragù is very similar to and may be ancestral to the Italian-American "Sunday gravy", the primary difference being the addition of a greater variety of meat in the American version, most famously meatballs (whence spaghetti and meatballs), braciole, sausage, and pork chops.
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