Bolognese Recipe

This recipe is adapted and scaled from Marcella Hazan’s, as published by the NY Times.

The basic steps are the same and so I took her phrasing verbatim in some cases, but I did make some ordering adjustments or included technique advice for doing it at such a large scale (a quadrupling of her recipe, to be precise, since it freezes so well) and getting a bit more flavor out of it.

Be patient! This recipe takes hours, and it tastes better the next day anyway. Don’t rush any steps!

Mise en place the soffritto ingredients¹:

2 cups chopped onion
2 ⅔ cups chopped celery
2 ⅔ cups chopped carrot

Then brown²

3 pounds ground beef³

in a large stock pot over medium high.

Remove the the beef from the pot. Turn it down to medium then put in

8 tbsp butter
4 tbsp olive oil

and melt, then add the onions. Cook and stir until it has become translucent, then add the chopped celery and carrot. Cook, stirring frequently, until it smells delicious.⁴

Add the beef, a few large pinches of salt and pepper, and cook, breaking up clumps, until it is no longer red. Add

4 cups whole milk

and simmer gently, stirring frequently, until it has bubbled away completely. Add

½ tsp fresh grated nutmeg

and stir. Add

4 cups dry white wine

and let it simmer until it has evaporated. Add

6 cups (two 28-ounce cans) whole canned tomatoes

crushing them with your hands before putting them into the pot. Stir thoroughly to coat all ingredients well.

When the tomatoes begin to bubble, turn the heat down so that the sauce cooks at the laziest of simmers, with just an intermittent bubble breaking through to the surface. Cook, uncovered, for 3 hours or more, stirring from time to time. While the sauce is cooking, you are likely to find that it begins to dry out and the fat separates from the meat. To keep it from sticking, add ½ cup of water whenever necessary. At the end, however, no water at all must be left and the fat must separate from the sauce. Stir to mix the fat into the sauce, taste and correct for salt.

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Xcode is Hot Garbage

If you do the onions in a food processor, do really short pulses of a second or less to avoid turning it into watery slop. ↩
Recommended technique: working one pound at a time, drop it in the pot without any oil, break it up into 6-8 meatballs, then brown all sides until it looks like a tasty burger. Break them up and brown the insides briefly, then deglaze with a splash of white wine, trying to break up any clumps. Alternate technique: working one pound at a time, break it up in the pot with a splash of water to loosen it and spread it evenly, then cook until the water is gone and a nice fond has formed. ↩
The first time I made this recipe as written I used Costco 75-25 wagyu (it was cheap!) and it. was. so. good. At no point was it watery nor did it ever have the typical ¼” of fat floating on top, surprisingly. At all points it looked like it was already a delicious sauce, instead of the usual where it doesn’t look good until it finally comes together near the end. ↩
Burning the soffritto ever so slightly adds a little depth of flavor that helps balance the sweetness of the onions and carrots. ↩