Traditional ragù alla bolognese, with fresh egg tagliatelle

italian-american bolognese like i usually make is a very meaty tomato sauce but the traditional ragu from bologna has little if any tomato in it ragu a la bolognese is a very meaty milk sauce and it's generally served on fresh egg tagliatelle which we're gonna make without a pasta rolling machine do this on a weekend the sauce cooks for many hours i'm gonna make a smaller quantity today enough for four big portions but you could double or triple this and have sauce to freeze the traditional sauce usually starts with pancetta finely diced this is pretty expensive where i live you could skip it or you could use any other fatty unsmoked cured meat maybe 50 or 100 grams this is 3 ounces 85 grams i'm using my chrissy teigen pan but a dutch oven would be the classic choice especially for a larger quantity i would not use cast iron this is an acidic sauce that cooks for hours and you could definitely leech out some noticeable iron i'm just letting my pancetta slowly render out its fat as the pan heats up to medium and i dice two or three carrots just stir the pancetta every now and then to make sure nothing is burning you could totally chop your veg in a food processor or grate them but real bolognese from amelia romagna tends to be pretty chunky so this is great get it cooking in the rendered fat celery next i'm doing this in order of how long each veg takes to cook carrots take the longest slice these in the matchsticks and then cut across to get a nice coarse dice and i'll get them in the pan nice gentle heat nothing is supposed to brown yet i'll probably only need half this onion most traditional recipes i've seen use equal quantities onion celery and carrot i'd use about 100 grams of each for four portions of sauce in goes the diced half of onion and i think i'm going to need some more fat to get all of this veg cooked some people use olive oil but a big knob of butter is also traditional and it goes with the dairy theme okay for meat you can use any ground beef but the italian academy of cuisine prescribes beef from the plate section for bolognese that'd be like skirt steak best i could do was flank which is a neighboring cut and i'll grab no more than a pound of this it's not ground yet obviously but if i slice it real thin against the grain of the meat perpendicular to the extremely obvious meat fibers and then if i cut across those strips these should just fall apart into minced meat quite easily honestly i didn't even need to get them this fine this meat is going to cook for hours so even bigger pieces will just disintegrate something else the academy recommends is cooking the meat and the veg separately they say the veg should be sweated gently with no browning while the meat should be blasted brown so fine i'll get the meat in the now empty pan and then another common thing in emilia romagna is to use a mixture of beef and ground pork though obviously you could use all beef if you want also traditional to use veal i've got at least 500 grams of ground beef and pork combined in there so a little over a pound i'll turn the heat on high to get it browning you might get some initial browning right up front but then a ton of water is going to start pouring out of the meat and you have to evaporate that off before browning can resume that's fine gives you ample opportunity to break this up with a wooden spoon eventually the boiling will be over and you're going to start to hear and smell it frying a little bit don't go overboard a little browning will do it if you get every particle in here crunchy brown the sauce just tastes burned now for the only tomato in this sauce a big squeeze of tomato paste and that's it some traditional recipes use some pureed fresh tomatoes but again only a tiny bit the first written recipe for this sauce from the 18th century has zero tomato time to deglaze with a glass or two of dry white wine this is totally traditional this is not just me being me if you want to skip this use water and a splash of vinegar ideally white balsamic vinegar i would normally use a lot more white wine than that but i'm trying to keep it traditional today let's get the cooked vegetables back in notice there's no garlic most traditional recipes say no garlic it drowns out the other flavors they say all right i'm gonna give this a big pinch of salt to start with and a few grinds of pepper mostly because that'll make the smell better as it simmers for half a day the pepper will i'll grab a carton of chicken stock and get everything just submerged if you used plain water it really wouldn't be a huge difference and yeah simmer gently for at least two hours and potentially four or five i'ma have this with fresh pasta so that's a big carb bomb that i'm gonna need to offset with my breakfast from magic spoon the sponsor of this video the high protein grain grain-free child-like cereal for grown-ups who can't eat like children anymore alas let's see if they've got any new flavors blueberry muffin i can smell it through the box some of my other favorites are in here too like honey nuts which they just made permanent by the way the flavors are the exact ones you know and love but the main substance of this non-cereal cereal is milk protein this one's got zero grams sugar five grams net carbs and 13 grams of protein and it tastes like blueberry flavoring which is exactly how i want it to taste click my link in the description to build your own variety box there's fruity peanut butter all kinds of your favorite flavors use my code regucia and you'll get five dollars off if you don't like it magic spoon will give you your money back go to magicspoon.com regucia to save five dollars that's in the description they're shipping to the us canada and the uk now too thank you magic spoon so every now and then i'll just give this a stir to make sure nothing is sticking to the bottom and burning and i'll top it off with more stock the main reason to add the stock little by little is to make sure that you don't put in way too much if you do you'll have to boil out a whole ton of water before you can actually eat let me make my fresh pasta dough i do this in a bowl which i think is way cleaner than the traditional well method hey a double yolker i thought that egg looked big i usually figure one eggs worth of fresh pasta per person but you could be safe and go with three eggs for every two people if you want the pasta super yellow drop in an extra yolk or two makes it more kind of luxurious lately i've been adding like a teaspoon of olive oil per egg it makes the dough a little easier to roll out by hand maybe do a pinch of salt in there fresh pasta is hard to get fully seasoned by just salting the boil water and i'm really not sure why everything is beaten smooth and now you just stir in as much flour as the eggs will take which will usually be like half a cup 50 or 60 grams all-purpose flour per egg no point in measuring though it's just as much as you can get in when the fork becomes useless i'll go in with my hand when the dough feels not terribly sticky or messy anymore i might transfer it to the counter where it's just a little easier to knead but you don't have to get it all the way smooth and elastic yet just let it rest covered for at least 20 minutes here my sauce has been cooking for four hours it was edible hours ago but the long cook dissolves a ton of gelatin from the meat which gives this a luxurious texture and toward the end here i deliberately boiled most of the water out because i wanted to make maximum room in there for milk whole milk is traditional though you can use cream if you're feeling indulgent it's real good i don't know maybe a cup or two in there 300 mils or something enough to once more get everything just barely submerged this will look like dog vomit at this stage but keep the faith i think the reason most traditional recipes have you add the milk toward the end is we don't want all of the milk proteins to denature we want to simmer this super gently for 20 or 30 more minutes just to boil out some more water while still maintaining the natural emulsion of the milk that's to help hold the water and fat phases of the sauce together i've got some water coming to a boil for pasta and i've got ample time now to roll it out on the counter use plenty of flour to keep everything from sticking and just have at it with the rolling pin you do this with a rolling pin and it'll steam it first like it's never going to work just keep going little by little you'll see it'll stretch out you could use a rolling machine of course but once i stopped using my rolling machine i started making fresh pasta way more often i hate getting out the machine i hate cleaning it i hate finding a place to clamp it to the counter and it's a pain to run the pasta through without a second person to help you feed it as it gets longer and longer to me the rolling pin is just much simpler and more pleasurable give that sauce a stir don't want to let that milk get too hot and denature those proteins maybe i'll give this a flip just to make sure both sides are really well floured it's really tough to get pasta sheets super thin with just a rolling pin but i don't care i like my fresh noodles thick and chunky get this very well floured so that it does not stick to itself i'm draping this over itself a few times to make it easier to cut back on the cutting board and then the traditional shape for this sauce is tagliatelle wide ribbons the bologna chamber of commerce says these should be 6.5 to 7 millimeters wide when uncooked because of course the bologna chamber of commerce concerns itself with such things i guess i'm going a little wider than that so call it popper delay and you can sue me bologna chamber of commerce toss a bunch of flour over those to coat these sticky cut surfaces we just created and then tossed to separate and unroll all of the noodles if you were making these hours in advance you would need to drape them over something but since we're doing this when the sauce is almost done they can just sit in a pile for a few minutes the sauce no longer looks like dog vomit which is nice texture looks saucy but still pretty thick see how the spoon leaves a trail at the bottom of the pan i think that's perfect thickness time to taste for seasoning i think it's got plenty of salt from that carton of stock just need some more fresh ground pepper the earliest written recipe for this sauce calls for cinnamon but if any non-pepper spice is common these days in the traditional recipes it's a pinch of nutmeg which again goes with the dairy theme nutmeg is nice with milk alrighty i've got a big pot of water boiling i'll throw a handful of salt in there and drop in the noodles fresh pasta cooks in like two minutes but these are thicker noodles so i might give them three or four when you see them lighten in color they swell up a little bit they float enthusiastically they're cooked and you really don't have to nail the timing like you do with dried pasta i'll go strain these and ah that's hot nice one ragusia i won't quite drain this entirely a little starchy pasta water is good for the sauce early versions of this recipe use a little flour in the sauce probably to get a similar starchy texture we might need all of this sauce we might not so i like to add the sauce to the pasta and not the other way around that way i can add more as needed you never know until you get the sauce stirred through the best thing for dosing out a long pasta shape apart from one of those fancy pasta serving forks is tongs way easier way cleaner to drop the pasta down from above and that's it that's the traditional dish grating on cheese at the end is apparently frowned upon i might throw on some leaves from my celery as a garnish just because i have them and i love them but there you go how does it taste it to me it tastes like you could use some more wine and or tomatoes traditional bolognese is not acidic enough for my taste but i really like the dairy component contrary to what that scene in goodfellas would have me believe i'm honestly not sure i can taste the pork flavor mixed in with the beef but that honestly might just speak to the mild flavor of american pork i think i prefer my americanized chicken liver bolognese linked in the description the earliest written italian recipe suggests some chicken livers too by the way but hey this is good too a classic for a reason

Channel: Adam Ragusea

Views: 938,727

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Id: VnYpoTM9ihc

Length: 11min 53sec (713 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 23 2022