Ragù Bolognese is Easy, Actually | Kenji's Cooking Show

hey everyone it's kenji we're going to make some ragu bolognese bowl and used it so this is not the first time i've done a video on this um but this is the simplest version i'm going to make i have another video on here on my channel that's based off the recipe that's in my book and on sirius eats which is a sort of very complex ragu bolognese that um you know some people would call inauthentic or non-traditional which it is but it's also delicious um but this version we're gonna make today is a much simpler definitely more sort of traditional version like you would see in bologna so we're gonna start with a wide pan you could also use a dutch oven if you want but a wide pan a little bit of olive oil not too much maybe a couple tablespoons and then i've got here about four to six ounces or so of pancetta this is pretty optional you know you could use salt pork if you want if you had guanchala you could use that you could also just completely leave this out and it would still taste fine but i like having a little bit of pancetta in here for the flavor and this is pancetta that i basically you know you can buy this the ends of pancetta that have been chopped up like this at the supermarket at least in the regular supermarket i shop that you can um and that's not like a it's not like a specialty italian store anything it's just like a safe way but certainly you can go to a specialty italian store and ask ask the guy at the counter at the deli counter if you could have the ends of the pancetta you can also use the ends of the prosciutto or you can buy you know you can buy a sliced pancetta or thick pinch at the end chop it up yourself so we're just going to let that brown a little bit i got it over pretty high heat okay so regular bolognese comes from northern italy um my cousin actually lives in bologna um and if you go to bologna what you'll find is that virtually every single restaurant in bologna will serve their version of ragu bolognese served with either a tagliatelle or i mean like a wide fresh pasta or in or in the form of a lasagna um and virtually every restaurant will also have their own form of uh tortellini and broth similar to ravioli but a little sort of like a little different shape um with um in a in a broth like a clear chicken broth that's those are the sort of two classic dishes in bologna that and of course charcuterie like bowling uh mortadella you know what we call baloney in the u.s that's based off of mortadella which is a emulsified sausage with chunks of fat all right so my pancetta i can hear it initially it was giving doing like a sort of sound like uh the sound of moisture evaporating and eventually turns into more of like a crackly sound and that's the sound that indicates that all the moisture has been driven off and now we're in the process of really frying and browning so you can you want to keep your senses open while you're cooking all right so our pancetta is browned we got some nice flavor there so in goes i am using a combination of uh beef that's this guy lamb and pork but you don't need to use those you could use all beef you could use a combination of beef and pork ideally if you had access to veal ground veal you would use some ground veal in this mixture because it lends some gelatin and tenderness and richness to the sauce but we don't i don't have any veal i don't the markets around me don't sell it i could go to a specialty butcher but i very rarely go to you know go out of my way to buy special ingredients i usually just shop at the regular supermarket um and so i don't have any ground deal but it's okay i'll show you what we can do instead i like using lamb in my ragu because it adds some flavor but definitely not something that's necessary not something that is by any means common or traditional but i like doing it because it tastes good so this that was a half pound each of uh pork beef and lamb and by the way i will link to um either i'll link to a recipe you know my friend daniel gritzer has a version of bolognese on serious seats that's pretty similar to this one you know very classic and if that one's close enough to what i'm making here i'll just link there and note what i've made changes for otherwise i'll rewrite the recipe uh in the comments so look below all right so we're just gonna let that brown a bit you don't have to break it up too much at this point you want to let it brown a little bit if you're still clean uh meanwhile we're gonna take the vegetables um i actually had already i made another batch of this earlier today and turned it into a lasagna so that we could eat it later in the week um so i actually already um had some leftover carrots that i've chopped but otherwise we're gonna um our vegetables are gonna be very basic um you know western european mirepoix um or as they call it in a italian sofrito so um carrots onions celery um and the ratio i use is about about three parts onion two parts celery one part carrot um you can adjust that according to your own taste you know if you really love onions do more um if you want something more you know more vegetable and less sweet more celery and if you want to maximize that sweetness then more carrot it's really it's really up to you i just happen to like that ratio but i but i eyeball it and i also you know it depends on what ingredients i have at any given moment um so those are some baby carrots that we actually pulled from our neighbor's garden or my daughter called from our neighbor's garden so i will repay that favor repay those carrots by giving them some some of this ragu when i'm done with it so we're looking for a pretty fine dice on here so it all kind of melts in the sauce oh i also got some fresh garlic there for celery trim off the ends cut it into segments cut lengthwise into strips like that okay and then rotate and kind of cross the process for you know mincing and dicing virtually any vegetable is the same you want to basically just decide what size you want to do it and then cut it across each of its axes um at that size and then you end up with dice that you know depending on the geometry of the vegetable is not going to be perfectly evenly shaped but at least you know that um there's nothing that's going to be too big or too small and it's all going to be roughly the right size and that's true yeah for virtually any vegetable i can think of i'm sure someone in the comments will come up with a counter example but if you if you want to know how to cut a vegetable ask and i'll try and respond to you in a future video similar with an onion we're gonna cut in and when we're cutting an onion we do want to at least i do want to aim for the golden ratio so imagine this is one you're aiming for a point about 1.6 or 1.7 below the onion and aiming your knife towards that and that mathematically according to the model my friend made is going to give you uh the most even dice size when you then cut across it and you do need to make those horizontal i mean you don't need to but making the horizontal cuts will result in a more even dice size despite what anyone might tell you the mathematical models will show it all right so i can hear this browning now so i'm gonna give it another stir um people ask me how i keep my stovetop clean uh the answer is i just clean it after each use um i at the very least i give it a good wipe down with a damp towel and most of the time you know if there's any kind of oil splatter which i'm sure is going to be today because we're going to be simmering a sauce and frying meat and whatnot i will take out the grates and spray it down with some formula 409 and uh give it a once over with a sponge and then dry it with a towel and that's how i clean it um if there's really like caked on gunk you know like if i had like if i spilled milk into there and i got milk like into the um under the grates onto the end and it really burned on to the uh the stainless steel there what i'll do is i'll use some uh barkeeper's friend which is the same thing i use to keep my stainless steel clean uh but it's it's a product made with oxalic acid it's a powder you want the powder kind not the uh not the uh liquid kind and uh that's how i keep my stove sparkling all right so you see i'm breaking up the meat like this um if you're impatient about using a wooden spoon a good tool to use well you can use a potato masher but i prefer even using a pastry cutter [Applause] one of these guys here see it's got blades it's made for cutting butter into flour for making pie crusts and whatnot but uh it's really good at breaking up meat in a pan so if you're making like a you know a very rough tomato sauce and you have a can of whole peeled tomatoes this is also a good tool for breaking up those whole field tomatoes if you don't want to get your fingertips dirty see it does the work of five wooden spoons at once so here we're looking for relatively brown you know when you brown ground meat like this there's always a trade-off the more you brown it the more flavor you get but even ground meat can start to get kind of dry and crumbly when you make it into a sauce so there's kind of a trade-off you can decide for yourself how much you want to brown it um you know there are ways to work around that you know some people what they'll do is they'll brown it as a whole patty so you get a lot of really nice dark brown surface and then you break it up so that the meat inside is still tender um so there are ways you can sort of game the system but if you're just being a you know casual making a casual bolognese or chili you know ground beef chili or whatever you don't have to worry about it too much just let it brown on a mount um and i'm gonna season with salt season with pepper black pepper and once our meat is brown the way we like it i'm going to go in with my vegetables might be more onion than we need but well whatever i like onion you might notice you know some people might notice that i'm going in with my onion and garlic at the same time and and if you you know if you've been a long time follower of say cooks illustrated or even serious eats or something some of my stuff um you've probably heard red in places that well you know onion cooks slower than garlic does so you want to add your garlic at some point after you add your onions so that it doesn't burn um this is true you know if you're cooking just onion on its own uh it'll take longer to cook than if you're cooking just garlic on its own but the reason for that is because onion has a higher moisture content and so the onion will you know takes a little longer for that moisture to evaporate and as long as there's moisture in a pan or in something that you're sauteing the temperature sort of self-regulates because the heat basically sort of selectively gets used to evaporate moisture as opposed to raising temperature and beginning those browning reactions so you know this is very roughly true not exactly true so uh you know if you're if you're a physicist who uh wants to argue about this um go for it but um the general rule is that until most moisture has been driven off you're not really going to get any browning of anything because the reaction you know the reactions the mayor browning reactions take place at higher temperatures than uh the boiling point of water so the idea is that because your onions are in there your celery and carrots are also in there um and regulating the temperature of the contents of this pan to rel you know to not all the way below 212 degrees or fahrenheit or 100 degrees celsius but a little bit below that um until all the moisture from those vegetables has evaporated you're not really going to get any hotter and therefore you're not going to get too much browning oop i think that was my uh one of my gopros overheated so you might have just lost the top you will let it cool down you know what i should do is i should turn on the fan i guess i forgot that heat travels up there all right we'll we'll rely on my head cam view for now that was just a little experiment that failed um all right so our vegetables getting pretty soft um in the meantime i'm gonna chop up a little bit of sage and sage and parsley optional ingredients uh you don't have to add these you know one nice way to do this uh bolognese is to tie a sprig of rosemary up with a string a few sprigs of rosemary up with a string and throw that in there while you're sauteing everything you can also do the same with some time sprigs uh you know you don't have to add any herb at all but um if you want to sort of add a little bit of layer a little layer of something to here that's gonna um increase the flavor herbs is a good idea um so we're gonna use a little bit of sage and parsley mainly because that's what i had so to chop herbs pick the leaves bundle them up like this chop chop chop chop chop chop chop um so people might ask me which version of bolognese is better you know this one this sort of simpler one or the more complex one that i have in my you know my book around series each you know the more complex one it includes uh chicken livers we do a few other things to it that um we saute the vegetables separately there's a there's a few steps you do that alter the final dish i wouldn't say either one is better the other one is more work i think you and you know in the long run you develop a little more flavor and you sort of develop cleaner flavors um but you know this is a it can it can be a rustic dish um it often is so it's really up to you how much which recipe you want to look at and which elements you want to take from each recipe there's no real better or worse it's really just a matter of what speaks to you okay so i'm going in with my herbs now that our vegetables are softened and you see this actually doesn't really take much time at all i think i've taken maybe 15 minutes so far um just by the way i'm going to prep some oh so we don't have veal so what veal adds to it is gelatin we don't have veal so instead uh what i'm going to do is i'm going to take some chicken stock and i'm just going to add a little powder gelatin to it so it's a couple cups of chicken stock a few tablespoons of powdered gelatin that i'm sprinkling over the top just let it sit there and hydrate um if you have homemade chicken stock that's super gelatinous you could even skip that and just use your chicken stock or if you have veal stock even better that's going to be super gelatinous um and then i'm going in with some tomato paste this is double concentrated tomato paste so i'm using maybe two tablespoons or so if you were using regular tomato paste you could use a quarter cup um but of course eyeball it if you want more tomato use more tomato if you want less use less you can also add tomato puree or canned peeled tomatoes or pasata something like that but you know depending on how much you like tomatoes and how tomato you want your sauce but in general you know ragu bolonese is a meat sauce it's not a it's not a tomato sauce with meat it's a meat sauce with a little bit of tomato so don't you know do you all use as much tomatoes you want but typically in a bolognese you wouldn't really go overboard with the tomatoes all right so i think we're good there all right so now you see all that brown stuff on the bottom of the pan right there we want to get that stuff off and into our sauce because that all has flavor um so the way we're gonna do that is we're going to deglaze and we're using some white wine pinot grigio from a box you don't need the fancy stuff first all you want to make sure is that you have a dry wine it doesn't matter if it's white or red either one will work adding maybe a cup or so and then we're just going to use a wooden spoon to scrape the reason you want a wooden spoon for this is because a wooden spoon is stiff so it lets you scrape pretty hard but it's also a little bit malleable so if you tried to do this with a metal spoon of course you would find that you'd gouge your pan or you'd find little imperfections in the surface of your pan that your spatula gets caught in so a wooden spoon kind of conforms to the shape of your pan it also allows you to get into the corners you know conforms to the shape of the corners of your spin of your pan um so you know and a silicon spatula would be too weak for this a metal spatula would be too strong a wooden spoon is kind of like the um you know the goldilocks so the baby bear implement all right so we added our wine we cooked it until it's basically dry to get rid of the excess alcohol now we're going to add our last two ingredients here i think they're the last thing they might not be some milk another cup of milk and finally that stock with the gelatin added and there we go so the reason we're using a wide pan by the way a wide pan encourages more evaporation so that's going to speed up the process of browning heating and browning the meat and the vegetables it's also going to encourage this to reduce without having to boil it very very hard and without taking it too long so the general rule of thumb is that the wider your pan the more steam is going to come off the surface uh then the faster it's going to reduce given given a set you know given a set of ingredients the same set of ingredients um and the same sort of boiling level so we're going to keep this at a very bare simmer and let it go and that's going to reduce it relatively quickly it'll probably take an hour and a half or so maybe an hour if we were doing this in a taller pan like a dutch oven or something because there's less surface area at a simmer it would take longer to reduce it would take probably two to three hours you can do it either way it's just one takes longer than the other and of course there is as with any stew you know whether it's chunks of meat whether it's like an american beef stew or buff borgignon or any any kind of stew the longer you cook it that you know there is the longer you cook it the more tender the meat is going to become initially but there is a limit to that and eventually the meat fibers are going to completely break down so they can't hold any moisture at all and you're going to end up with a sort of dry a stew that's simultaneously wet and tender but also kind of tastes dry and leaves sort of chalky bits of meat in your mouth so there is such a thing as overcooking when it comes to any kind of ragu whether it's bolognese or chili or whatever um so we're gonna let this come to a simmer that's it now i'll reduce it down to that's what i'm looking for right there just a very bare simmer um and i will come back and see you i'm gonna go have lunch with my wife uh and i'll see you after that all right so i'll be back in a couple hours all right so it took a little bit longer sorry lunch took a little bit longer um but i don't you might have seen my hand tonight all i did was come home and uh give it a few stirs but you can see how much it's reduced um and how you might have watched if you watched closely on the timeless video um assuming the time-lapse video worked um you probably see the fat break out um as it cooks and then as it thickens as it reduces and that gelatin thickens and all the protein from the meat starts to thicken everything the fat will emulsify back in and so you end up with a sauce that doesn't look greasy even though at some point in the process it did um so if your bolognese ever looks greasy uh just let it reduce and the the greasiness will go away of course if you don't want the fat in there which i don't understand why you wouldn't for a dish like this um you can always skim it off but that is done um i've had some pasta cooking on the side here this is just some rigatoni i don't have any fresh pasta right now but basically i just cooked this because i wanted to show you uh show you what we got so i'm gonna take that pasta i'm gonna put it into a skillet um i didn't cook it in a ton of boiling water i've cooked it in just enough boiling water and you can see how concentrated and starchy that water is now which is what we want because that is what's going to help the sauce emulsify so when you're finishing this dish you know you can make it into a lasagna you can toss it with fresh tagliatelle something like that um i'm just using some uh dry rigatoni which uh i i got the you know the stuff that comes with um you know cut with bronze dyes so this is the um i can't remember berea or the the berea coletzione version or the or the decheco you know one of the supermarket brands but like they're not the nicer ones um that uh has a bit more texture to the pasta um cut on a bronze dye as opposed to a teflon dye so you get a little bit more surface area for clinging all right so we're going to add some little ladles full of sauce a little bit of sauce to the pasta and a little bit of pasta water and that starchy pasta water is going to help the sauce cling to the that's sorry the pasta cling to sauce and this takes me right back to my one of my earliest restaurant jobs which was working in a sort of fine dining northern italian restaurant and i was on the pasta station and i cooked a heck of a lot of pasta bolognese in the uh in the winter months but yeah whatever whatever pasta you choose you're looking for something that's kind of hearty so a rigatoni like this with ridges things that will capture that meat and that thick sauce or fresh thick pasta either pepper deli or tagliatelle you can make it yourself or you could uh you know buy it fresh i'll leave a link uh to a recipe for fresh pasta instructions for fresh pasta and serious heats um if you do feel like making making fresh pasta yourself i will probably make fresh pasta for the rest of this um one of the things that's great of bolognese by the way it uh improves in the fridge so take this put it into a container throw it in the fridge um it'll improve over a couple nights on the reheat so that gives you plenty of time to make it ahead all right so finally i'm going to add garnish it with um a bit of basil and parsley quite rough on the chop there you see how nice and creamy it gets when you emulsify it with that uh oh let's move this over here when you emulsify it with that pasta sauce all right and then shut this down to low add some parmesan cheese a little fresh olive oil for the flavor leave it a toss and there we go look at that you see how everything coats the pasta nice and creamy perfectly emulsified delicious sorry over here that'll be for you guys oh there you go that's it got it she'll get it eventually all right finishing off a little fresh parmesan and boy oh boy classic simple delectable treat possible and easy that is this is like the taste of winter for me hmm all right guys girls and non-binary pals pastor bolognese and i will see you next time [Music] you

Channel: J. Kenji López-Alt

Views: 1,298,756

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Id: cvROmO5ODnQ

Length: 27min 58sec (1678 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 05 2021