Baked Pasta with Bolognese Meat Sauce
The hour of simmering is not padding. That is how long the ground meat needs to go tender, the wine to lose its raw edge, and the tomatoes to collapse into something thick enough to cling to pasta. Rush it and you get meat sitting in acidic liquid instead of sauce.
The backbone is the standard ragu alla bolognese soffritto — carrot, onion and celery sweated in butter — but this version folds in bacon and 10 g of dried porcini, which push the flavor somewhere smokier and more forest-floor than the Italian original. The four tablespoons of heavy cream at the end are not decoration either; they take the sharp edge off the tomatoes.
Small things that decide it
- Strain the porcini soaking water through a coffee filter and use it in place of some of the broth. Most of the aroma is dissolved in there, not in the mushrooms.
- Add the meat to a properly hot pan and leave it alone for a minute before stirring — you want browning, not gray crumbles.
- 350 g of pasta is about 12 oz and the 375 g of tinned tomatoes is roughly one 14-oz can, so the ratio scales cleanly if you double the batch.
Part of Italian cuisine — 33 more recipes in the section.
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Ingredients
Instructions
Sauce
Soak the mushrooms in cold water and, once rehydrated, chop them finely.Cut the bacon, carrot, onion, garlic, and celery stalks into small cubes and saute them in the butter.
Add the ground meat and brown it, stirring. Add the tomato paste, mushrooms, salt, and pepper.
Finely chop the tomatoes, combine them with the meat and vegetables, pour in the broth and wine, sprinkle the sauce with oregano, cover, and simmer for 1 hour.
Then add the cream and simmer for another 10 minutes.
Assembly
Cook the pasta in plenty of salted water. Drain in a colander and, as soon as the water has run off, toss it with the sauce and part of the cheese.To serve, garnish with herbs and serve the remaining cheese on the side.
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