preparation time around 1 30 minutes, waiting time; 3 hours, preparation time +/- 10 minutes
I am an Italy-lover. You name it, I love it. Food, culture, climate, interactions and even their music. I love it all.
Now that the Italian food culture is making its way into every family’s kitchen, and that it is easy go-to food options for students, I thought; let’s dive into a recipe that is very familiar all around the world. A well known but also wrongly prepared recipe by so many if you look at the original Italian recipe.
Worldwide, everybody knows it as pasta Bolognese, but to the Italians, pasta Bolognese will always be pasta al ragù. Pasta al ragù is worldwide known as Bolognese because this dish finds its origins in Bologna, the capital city of the region Emilia-Romagna. This dish is also one of Emilia-Romagna’s signature dishes!
In this article, I try to explain to you the recipe for a real Italian pasta al ragù. Check the list down below for all the ingredients. In this recipe, I’d like to use tagliatelle, but of course, you can also use spaghetti, penne, farfalle or whichever pasta you like best.
This recipe exists out of two parts. Preparing the meat sauce and the pasta itself. Making the sauce takes a long time, however. You have to make it, and leave it on a low-heat pit for around 3 hours. Preparing the pasta itself won’t take longer than ten minutes.
What you need for a 2-people recipe:
150 gr beef
150 gr pork
+/- 100 gr tagliatelle
25 gr carrot, finely diced
25 gr celery, finely diced
25 gr onion, finely diced
150 gr tomato concentrate
Beef (or chicken) stock
0.5 cup of whole milk
¼ cup of red wine
Optional (cherry tomatoes and Parmigiano or Grana Padano cheese)
The sauce
1. Put the (sauce) pan on the stove and heat it up. The power should be around low-medium heat. Fully heat up the pan before you add the olive oil to the pan. Add the olive oil, the finely diced carrot, celery and onion. Cook the vegetables for about 10 to 15 minutes, or until they have gone soft.
2. In the meantime, you can mix the beef and pork together. Add a teaspoon of olive oil to the meat mix. When you add a bit of olive oil to the beef, it is much easier to massage the meat together because the olive oil helps the meat to crumble down. Keep mixing the meat until it is crumbled and then you can add it to the pan. Keep the pan on the low-medium heat.
Why mix the beef and pork together: the pork will give you the fatness and the flavour, while the beef will give you the perfect texture.
3. When you added it to the pan, you continue to crumble the meat in the pan with a wooden spoon.
There are a total of three liquids that are going into the mixture. 1; the red wine. You always want to add the wine first, because it needs to evaporate first – like this, the alcohol will disappear, but the flavour wills stay. 2; whole milk. The milk will tender the meat. 3; the beef/or chicken stock.
4. When the meat starts to turn brown, you add all of the red wine. The alcohol needs to evaporate, otherwise, the meat will become bitter.
5. When the wine is almost gone (mixed with the meat liquids and vegetable liquids and olive oil), you add the milk.
6. Now, your pasta water should be boiling and you add the tagliatelle. Add salt to the water, this should be a couple of pinches.
7. Now that your liquids in your pan have started to boil and disappear, add your beef/or chicken stock.
8. You can almost immediately add the tomato concentrate.
9. Now comes the waiting part. You leave the pan with all its contents on a low pit. You leave the lit on the pan. You stir the mixture every 15 to 20 minutes. The second 1.5h you leave the pan on the pit without the lit and keep on stirring as you did the first 1.5 hours.
After these 3 hours, all the liquids in the sauce have boiled away and your ingredients are now turned into a nice typical meat sauce. There is no excess liquids, just a nice and creamy textured red meat sauce.
It is finally dinner time! This means your sauce is almost perfect, you only need to boil your pasta.
The pasta itself
1. Start, by adding water for the pasta to a big pot and start boiling it up. In the meantime, you start cooking your other ingredients. Slowly let it get to its boiling point.
2. Add the tagliatelle and salt. The salt should be a big pinch, that is enough. Now, we want our pasta al dente! The tagliatelle should be in the boiling water for around 3 minutes, no longer!
3. When your pasta is done, grab the tagliatelle from the water (using a spaghetti spoon/ or food pincers for more convenience) and add it to the pan with the meat sauce. The pasta is now still wet, and because of that, the pasta can absorb some of the sauce’ flavour. The pasta water will also water the sauce down a little bit, but that doesn’t matter.
Now serve it on your plates, pair the dish with a glass of lovely red wine and enjoy your lovely authentic Italian pasta al ragù!
Buon Apetito e buona serata! Ciao
