Incredible Bolognese sauce

Difficulty 2/5

My aunt (and godmother) does a death by lasagna recipe (and I mean DEATH). And what it’s all about is the sauce. So I thought what don’t I take this, twist it my way and turn it into a bolognese sauce? So I did! And it was amazing, hearty, with lots of textures and flavour profiles. We use pancetta, sausage, beef, carrots, thyme, bayleaf… yum! So you basically just have to invest like 30min to prepare all of the ingredients and then another 15min to put them to cook and then leave it on its own for an hour. So it’s pretty easy for the amount of taste that comes out of it (and OMG the SMEELL!!!!!!). I hope you like it! Eat it with your favourite pasta 🙂

Portions: 4-5

Ingredients:
– 20ml vegetable oil
– 50g green onion
– 50g carrots
– 50g pancetta (I used cured, it could also be smoked. I would say don’t use bacon instead if you can avoid it)
– 50g sausage (don’t use anything that’s heavily spiced or flavoured, basically a basic pork sausage)
– 50g white button mushrooms
– 4 tbsp tomato paste
– 500g minced beef
– 8 tomatoes
– 2 tsp fresh or dry oregano
– 2 bayleaves
– 1tsp fresh or dry thyme leaves
– salt and pepper to taste

– parmesan for garnish (I used a really nice Italian parmigiano reggiano)

Procedure:
1. First the small dicing: peel and dice the carrot and onion, and also peel the sausage and cut small. Repeat also with the pancetta. The size should be around 3mm thick cubes as much as possible 🙂

2. Peel the tomatoes. You could use a knife or blanch it so peel it by hand. I did the second and how you do it is: first you cut a cross at the base and remove the core. Then, you pop them in really hard boiling water until you see the skin starting to split around the cuts. Then you take it out onto ice to stop it from cooking and voilá! Just peel away the skin. Then remove the seeds and chop small as well.

3. Now we’re going to cook! 🙂 Start by putting the oil in the pan and sweating the onion,carrot, sausage and pancetta. The onion will turn translucent, the carrot will start to cook and the pancetta and sausage will let go of the layers of delicious fat in them.

4. Add the tomato paste and cook it for 2min.

5. Add the beef and break it up with the spoon. Then the tomatoes, herbs and 1Lt of water.

6. Let it simmer for one hour, nearly no liquid will be left and your kitchen will be completely drowned in this amazing smell! Here’s what it looked like after 1/2 an hour:

And then you have a beautiful bolognese sauce! Serve with your favourite pasta 🙂 I used fresh egg pasta. Serve pretty and enjoy!