Bolognese sauce

Bolognese Sauce

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Bolognese sauce

Bolognese sauce (ragù
Ragú

Rag? is a brand name, marketed version of an Italian cusine-style sauce known as rag?. The Rag? brand was first sold in 1937 - and currently one of many consumer brands in the portfolio of Anglo-Dutch food giant Unilever....
alla bolognese in Italian, also known by its French name sauce bolognaise) is a meat

Meat

In modern English usage, meat most often refers to animal biological tissue used as food, mostly skeletal muscle and associated fat, but it may also refer to offal, including livers, skin, brains, bone marrow, kidneys, in some countries lungs, and a variety of other internal organs as well as blood....
-based sauce for pasta

Pasta

Pasta is a generic term for Italian cuisine variants of noodles, food made from a dough of flour, water and/or Egg , that is Boiling. The word can also denote dishes in which pasta products are the primary ingredient, served with sauce or seasonings....
originating in Bologna

Bologna

Bologna is the capital city of Emilia-Romagna in northern Italy, in the Po Valley , between the Po River and the Apennine Mountains, exactly between the Reno River and the S?vena River....
, Italy

Italy

Italy , officially the Italian Republic , is a country located on the Italian Peninsula in Southern Europe and on the two largest islands in the Mediterranean Sea, Sicily and Sardinia....
. Bolognese sauce is sometimes taken to be a tomato sauce but authentic recipes have only a small amount of tomato.

The people of Bologna traditionally serve their famous ragù with freshly made tagliatelle

Tagliatelle

Tagliatelle // is the classic pasta of the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy. Individually, they are long, flat ribbons, similar in shape to fettuccine, but typically about 0.65cm to 1cm wide....
(tagliatelle alla bolognese) and their traditionally green lasagne.

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Encyclopedia

Meat

Pasta

Bologna

Italy

Tagliatelle

Macaroni

Macaroni is a kind of moderately extended, machine-made dry pasta. Much shorter than spaghetti, and hollow, macaroni does not contain eggs. Though home machines exist that can make macaroni noodles, macaroni is usually commercially made....
or other durum wheat short pasta.

The recipe, issued in 1982 by the Bolognese delegation of Accademia Italiana della Cucina, confines the ingredients to beef

Beef

Beef is the culinary name for meat from bovines, especially domestic cattle . Beef is one of the principal meats used in the cuisine of Australia, European cuisine and the Americas, and is also important in Africa, East Asia, and Southeast Asia....
, pancetta

Pancetta

Italy pancetta or Croatian panceta is a type of dry cured meat. It is pork belly that has been salt-cured meat and spiced , and dried for about three months ....
, onion

Onion

Onion is a term used for many plants in the genus Allium. They are known by the common name "onion" but, used without qualifiers, it usually refers to Allium cepa....
s, carrot

Carrot

The carrot is a root vegetable, usually orange or white, or red-white blend in colour, with a crisp texture when fresh. The edible part of a carrot is a taproot....
s, celery

Celery

Apium graveolens is a plant species in the family Apiaceae commonly known as celery or celeriac depending on whether the petioles or roots are eaten....
, tomato paste

Tomato paste

Tomato paste is a thick paste made from ripened tomatoes with skin and seeds removed. Originally it was an artisan product that is still made the traditional way in parts of Sicily, Southern Italy and Malta....
, meat broth

Broth

Broth is a liquid in which bones, meat, fish, cereal grains, or vegetables have been simmering. Broth is used as a basis for other edible liquids such as soup, gravy, or sauce....
, red wine, and (optionally) milk

Milk

Milk is an opaque white liquid produced by the mammary glands of female mammals . It provides the primary source of nutrition for newborn mammals before they are able to digestion other types of food....
or cream

Cream

Cream is a dairy product that is composed of the higher-butterfat layer skimmed from the top of milk before homogenization. In un-homogenized milk, over time, the lighter fat rises to the top....
. However, different recipes, even in the Bolognese tradition, make use of chopped pork

Pork

Pork is the culinary name for meat from the domestic pig . The word, pork, is often meant to denote specifically the fresh meat of the pig, but it can be used as an all-inclusive term, to include cured, smoked, or processed meats It is one of the most-commonly consumed meats worldwide, with evidence of pig animal husbandry dating back...
or pork sausage, while chicken

Chicken

The chicken is a Domestication fowl. Recent evidence suggests that domestication of the chicken was under way in Vietnam over 10,000 years ago....
or goose

Goose

Goose is the English-language name for a considerable number of birds, belonging to the family Anatidae. This family also includes swans, most of which are larger than geese, and ducks, which are smaller....
liver

Liver

The liver is a vital organ present in vertebrates and some other animals; it has a wide range of functions, a few of which are detoxification, protein synthesis, and production of biochemicals necessary for digestion....
may be added along with the beef or veal

Veal

Veal is the meat of calves . Though veal can be produced from any calf, most veal comes from male calves of dairy cattle breeds. Compared to other meats, veal has a delicate taste and tender texture....
for special occasions, and today many use both butter

Butter

Butter is a dairy product made by churning fresh or fermentation cream or milk. It is generally used as a spread and a condiment, as well as in cooking applications such as baking, sauce making, and frying....
and olive oil for cooking the Soffritto

Soffritto

Soffritto: this Italian language word literally means "sub-fried" or "under-fried" because the lower heat used to "fry" your diced aromatic vegetables and the quantity of olive oil is very little ....
of small amounts of celery, carrot and onion. Prosciutto

Prosciutto

Prosciutto is the Italian language word for ham . In English language the word is almost always used for an aged, dry-Curing , spiced Italian ham that is usually sliced thin and served uncooked....
, mortadella

Mortadella

Mortadella pronounced /morta'dl:a/ is a large Italy sausage or cold cut made of finely hashed/ground heat-cured pork sausage which incorporates at least 15% small cubes of pork fat ....
, or porcini fresh mushrooms when in season may be added to the ragù to further enrich the sauce. Milk is frequently used in the early stages of cooking to render the meat flavors more "delicate" but cream is very rare in the everyday recipe and only a very little would be used. Most agree that the longer Ragù alla Bolognese cooks the better, a 5 or 6 hour simmer is not unusual.

Modern interpretations

Heston Blumenthal

Heston Blumenthal Order of the British Empire is the chef and owner of The Fat Duck, a three-Michelin Guide restaurant in the village of Bray, Berkshire in Berkshire voted Best Restaurant in the UK by the Good Food Guide 2007, and voted Best Restaurant in the World by fellow chefs in 2005....
's BBC series In Search of Perfection saw Blumenthal on a quest to find the perfect Bolognese recipe. His travels took him to Bologna and neighbouring towns in search of the most typifying example of the dish. His culminating recipe was based on two principles: the richness of the sauce, whilst retaining the British interpretation of the dish "like mum would make it". It included some unconventional ingredients, including pork, (Bologna's favourite meat and much used in Bologna today) Worcestershire sauce

Worcestershire sauce

Worcestershire sauce is a fermentation liquid condiment first made at 68 Broad Street, Worcester by two dispensing chemists, John Wheeley Lea and William Henry Perrins....
, nam pla (thai fermented fish sauce, but both of these ingredients have a degree of authenticity if it is considered that they are related to Roman garum

Garum

Garum, also called liquamen, is a type of fish sauce condiment that was popular in Ancient Rome society.Although it enjoyed its greatest popularity in the Roman world, it originally came from the Ancient Greece, gaining its name from the Greek language words garos or ????? g?ron, which named the fish whose intestines were o...
), and tarragon

Tarragon

Tarragon or dragon's-wort is a perennial plant herb in the family Asteraceae related to Artemisia . Corresponding to its species name, a common term for the plant is "dragon herb." It is native to a wide area of the Northern Hemisphere from easternmost Europe across central and eastern Asia to India, western North America, and south to...
(unheard of in most of Italy). He stewed the sauce for four hours, and used butter instead of cream to "finish" the sauce

Traditionally white wine is used, not red. The sauce is supposed to retain some acidity, and remain more meat-coloured than tomato.

Spaghetti alla Bolognese

Spaghetti alla Bolognese, Spaghetti Bolognese, or Spaghetti Bolognaise in a form popular outside of Italy

Italy

Meat

Sauce

In cooking, a sauce is liquid or sometimes semi-solid food served on or used in preparing other foods. Sauces are not normally consumed by themselves; they add flavor, moisture, and visual appeal to another dish....
served on a bed of spaghetti

Spaghetti

Spaghetti is a long, thin, cylindrical pasta of Italy origin. A variety of pasta dishes are based on it, from spaghetti with cheese and pepper or garlic and oil to a spaghetti with tomato, meat, and other sauces....
with a good sprinkling of grated Parmigiano

Parmigiano Reggiano

Parmigiano-Reggiano is a hard, fat granular cheese, cooked but not pressed, named after the producing areas of Parma, Reggio Emilia, Modena, Bologna, in Emilia-Romagna, and Mantova, in Lombardy, Italy....
cheese. Although Spaghetti alla Bolognese are very popular outside of Italy, it never existed in Bologna, where ragù is served always with the local egg pastas tagliatelle or lasagne. Spaghetti is a durum wheat pasta from Naples, and the Naples Ragù of a meat flavoured thick tomato sauce clings much better to slippery spaghetti than Bologna's ground beef ragù.

In recent decades, the dish has become very popular in Sweden

Sweden

Sweden , officially the Kingdom of Sweden , is a Nordic countries on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. Sweden has land borders with Norway to the west and Finland to the northeast, and it is connected to Denmark by the ?resund Bridge in the south....
and Denmark

Denmark

Denmark is a Scandinavian country in northern Europe and the senior member of the Kingdom of Denmark. It is the southernmost of the Nordic countries....
as , in Swedish, and in Danish, especially among children. It is also popular in the United Kingdom

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom , the UK or Britain,is a sovereign state located off the northwestern coast of continental Europe....
(where it is colloquially abbreviated to spag bol or spag bog) and has become a staple of the British dinner table. In the United States

Italian-American cuisine

Italian-American cuisine is the cuisine of Italian-American immigrants and their descendents, who have modified Italian cuisine under the influence of American culture and immigration patterns of Italians to the United States....
as well, the term 'bolognese' is often applied to a tomato-and-ground-beef sauce that bears little resemblance to ragù served in Bologna.

Chinese

China

China is a Culture of China, an ancient civilization, and, depending on perspective, a national or multinational entity extending over a large area in East Asia....
people often use the term "Western zhajiang mian

Zhajiang mian

Zhajiang mian is a Mandarin cuisine dish consisting of thick wheat noodles topped with a mixture of ground pork stir-fried with Fermented bean paste....
" to refer to spaghetti bolognese, alluding to its superficial similarities with the traditional Chinese noodle dish of zhajiang mian

Zhajiang mian

Zhajiang mian is a Mandarin cuisine dish consisting of thick wheat noodles topped with a mixture of ground pork stir-fried with Fermented bean paste....
as both are dry noodles covered with a thick ragù mainly made of minced meat. This provides a symmetrical perspective to Westerners referring to zhajiang mian as "Chinese spaghetti".

Bolognese sauce

Modern interpretations

Spaghetti alla Bolognese

See also

External links