As a kid my all time and forever favourite was my dad's spaghetti bolognese. He followed no recipe. Just cooked by feel. It was done when it tasted right. When it seemed like it'd been cooking long enough. How many onions did he had? However many--maybe one, maybe two--he felt like taking from the cupboard. How much beef mince? However much was left over after my mum made rissoles (another childhood favourite, so long as they were served with instant gravy). He'd add as much tomato paste and Vegemite (really) and curry powder as seemed appropriate. Great ladles of the sauce would be served with spaghetti and, at the request of my gastronome sister and I, grated tasty cheese. The wonderfully politically incorrect Coon brand.
What is bolognese, really? Well, it's Bologna's take on ragu: a meat sauce served with pasta. And yeah, a meat sauce. Bolognese here is often thought of as a tomato and meat sauce or, in the case of some of the pre-made sauces you can buy in supermarkets, actively promoted as a tomato sauce with animals optional. They don't serve the stuff with spaghetti in Bologna, either. They use egg pasta. Spaghetti is just wheat and water, in case you didn't know.
But, honestly, fuck all that. Hearing about the authentic versions of dishes is very interesting and fascinating and all--I love flipping through Larousse and just geeking out over the history of classic French fare--but you shouldn't be aiming, I think, to make something authentic. You should be aiming to make something that tastes good. If there's some addition you can make that's totally opposite to what they do in Bologna or even Italy in general--whether it's using kangaroo mince as opposed to or in addition to beef or going all Anthony Bourdain and jacking the sauce with a few spoonfuls of homemade demi glace--that's going to take your sauce to the next level, flavour-wise, why not do it? I've no time for the 'I'm from this place and if it's not done the way we do it, it's being done incorrectly' mentality.
This is not a recipe for ragu ala Bologna. I'm going to assume that you've made it before and could, worst case and all, make it again without the aid of Jamie Oliver or taste.com.au. I'm looking more at the components of the sauce--the soffrito base, the meat, the liquid(s), etc--and floating out some suggestions as to how you could change them. There are some things which I think just suck--mass produced pre-made sauces, stock cubes--but other than that and maybe even including that, it's up to you. Your idea of good 'bolognese' is probably different to mine and that's frankly just fucking fine. Make what you want to eat. Not what some dweeb with a blog tells you is good.
basic pointers
Pasta: you need not serve with spagetti. Use other long pastas, tubular pasta (like penne) or fusili. Use, even, lasagne. Use homemade stuff or dried stuff. If it's store bought, tho', pay a little extra and buy a decent brand--maybe something from an Italian shop. There's a world of different between home brand stuff and a decent quality (but still, there's no need to spend a stupid amount here, let's be reasonable) durum wheat pasta from Italy. Too, you can use lasagne or gnocchi (having sampled a few store bought gnocchis, I'd argue that unlike pasta, this is something you need to make if you want a decent result--but I'm willing to be pointed in the direction of a good brand). Shit, nothing is stopping you from slopping your ragu on toast or over roast potatoes (cooked, obviously, in duck fat). Maybe even using it as a pie filling. It's your sauce: do whatever the fuck you want with it.
Cooking time: I know that some store bought sauces mention browning an onion and some minced meat and then adding the sauce and simmering the whole horrible lot for maybe 30 minutes, but that's no way to make decent ragu. Ragu isn't something you can cook for a few minutes. It's just not. Whether you use minced beef from a supermarket or a whole leg of a goat, you really need to--really need to--cook it for a good while. With minced meat I'd look at 2 1/2 to 3 hours. With something like lamb neck or veal shank, I'd be looked at around 4 hours. We're talking minimums here. If you have a slow cooker or a good pot with a lid and an oven that will happily hold a low temperature, you can cook this shit all day or overnight.
Cheese: don't buy anything that comes in a fucking salt shaker, don't buy anything pre-grated, don't buy anything that's just flavourless crap. Here, quality counts. Go to a good deli. Try a few things--you don't just have to stick to parmesan--that look alright, taste them and, when you find something you like, buy a small quantity. Grate or shave it as you need it.
Other pairings: if you're up for making it, a simple salad of seasonable vegetables goes well with the rich heavy meatiness of bolognese. And too, drink-wise, you can't beat a bottle of good red (I'm writng this to the tune of Tahbilk's 2006 fuck off good shiraz): even if you're just cooking a weeknight meal, there's probably one already open, so hey ...
meat
It's all about the meat. Unless, of course, you buy into the school of thought that bolognese--whatever the people of Bologna sauce--is as much about tomatoes as it is about meat. The meat(s) you choose impact totally on the outcome of the sauce. The way you cut the meat--oh yes, you can use more than supermarket-grade animal paste--determines a helluva lot. Obviously choosing different meats or cuts will impact hugely on the flavour, but too, the texture will be altered hugely. Even if you're using two kinds of mince.
In terms of mince, I'd recommend two options: getting mince from a butcher you trust or actually mincing something like beef chuck or pork neck. Most butchers will be willing to do this for you. Just be sure that if you go down this road that you use the mince right away.
You can use whatever meat you want or a combination thereof. A lot of people use beef by itself and that's okay, but your sauce--even if you change nothing else in your recipe--will be taken to the next level if you add some pork mince and, perhaps, some veal. Changing the ratio of beef:pork (or beef:pork:veal) will, again, change the flavour and texture of the end product. Kangaroo mince, which is reasonably priced and of reasonable quality--yes, even the supermarket-grade stuff--is very good in bolognese (and chilli con carne and etc). Try, too, lamb. Or even running a boned out rabbit or two through the mincer.
Moving beyond mince, you can throw in whole legs or shoulders of whatever. Cheap cuts, too, like beef short ribs. Anything that will break down and generally become awesome in taste and texture after a good few hours in the pot. Cooking on the bone always always always makes for a tastier end product. Once the meat has finished cooking, you remove it from the bone (and, obviously, discard the bone) and chop or shred it. You need not keep the cuts whole, of course. I sometimes use shanks and other cheap cuts, like lamb necks, to make ragu. I get the butcher to cleave them in a few pieces so I don't have to use a massive amount of liquid.
Furthermore, you can grab all those good cuts--the chuck and whatever else--and simply chop them into small cubes. You'll end up with a different texture again. Experiment: nothing is stopping you from mixing, say, pork mince with diced beef.
Whatever you use, when it comes to browning it, do it properly. I don't agree at all with browning the meat with the onions. Meat should be browned with nothing else in the pan (save your frying medium). It should browned in small batches over a fairly high, but not screaming hot, flame. You want to brown it, too. Not turn it grey. Browning meat might not seal in its juices, but it does add flavour.
cured meat
Worthy of a subheading of its own. The best ragus I've had have contained one or more forms of cured meat--usually pork. You take whatever it is--bacon, pancetta, salami, cured neck or cheek--dice it and fry it until crispy. The resulting grease can be used for browning the mince. Cured pork adds flavour and texture. Understand that these products will add salt. Don't add too much salt--a little is okay--at the start of the cooking process. The sauce will be cooking for a good while and, given the lid will be off for at least some of that, will reduce down a fair way. Some of the things you'll be adding--processed tomato products, cured meat--will add a fair amount of salt. Add extra salt, if you must, towards the end of the cooking process.
I've seen people use 'Italian sausage' (basically pork sausages that have seasonings--fennel and such--that are, in some vague way, worthy of giving a sausage such a name). This, from experience, I would not recommend, but again, I'd be happy to hear someone having success with it. If you go down this road, use the best quality sausages you can find.
tomatoes
Oh. Controversy. According to the folks of Bologna, bolognese--even tho' I've reverted to ragu, altho' the point still applies--is a meat sauce. End of story. It has a little--and I mean a little--tomato paste, but that's it. No canned tomatoes. No passata.
I part from tradition here. I like the combination of meat and tomatoes. I've tried recipes involving just a few spoonfuls of tomato paste, but I've never liked them as much as the versions of heavy on the tomato.
I prefer passata over canned tomatoes here: I use passata by itself, but you can use it with canned tomatoes or used canned tomatoes by themselves. Whatever the case, if you're using one of these products you don't need tomato concentrate.
If you can get someone's homemade passata--or if you have access to quality tomatoes and regularly make your own--you'll be eating very well, but really, even the cheap store bought stuff is okay. Here, and with canned tomatoes too, I find there's little variation in terms of quality at the lower end of the market. Or, to put it another way, everything you'll find in the supermarkets and most delis is pretty much the same: okay, at least so long as you're buying the Italian stuff (the Australian canned tomatoes just don't do it for me). You can buy high end shit at expensive shops (Simon Johnson, etc) and I reckon it'd make for an even better product--Heston Blumenthal made his bolognese with canned tomatoes grown on the slopes of a volcano--but it's probably all a bit unimportant. Spend the money buying better quality meat and pasta.
soffrito
The vegetable base. Some people just use onions, but the traditional way--and I think the best way--is to at least have carrots and celery, too. Vegetables add sweetness and texture. You could also throw in some fennel or leek if you wanted to. The amount of vegetables in the sauce is, again, a point for potential fisticuffs. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall uses a crazy amount of onions in his bologese (and it works) but I've seen people working with the same amount of meat use only one or two onions. Ensure you dice the vegetables fairly small and that you cook them until soft. Whether you go all the way and caramelise the onion is up to you--it'll impact on flavour, of course. Feel free to experiment with the frying medium. The grease from the cured pork works, but you could use olive oil, some other oil (I disagree with the odur of vegetable oil and so never use it for anything), butter or even duck fat, if you're in the mood for being obscene and sexy and hardcore.
Now, garlic. I like garlic a lot. Fresh garlic, to me, doesn't just mean using something from the supermarket's fruit and veg section as opposed to some rancid-smelling shit from a jar. Garlic, like onion, can sit around a whole lot and be edible and everything, but it really shouldn't sit around at all. Edible doesn't mean good. A lot of the garlic that's avaliable in supermarkets is imported from wherever and has been kicking around for days or weeks. It's lost a lot of flavour and aroma making it basically a pointless addition to anything. Garlic is really easy to grow--you can buy it at garden shops or even plant a couple of cloves of something you bought to cook--and it's worth doing, but if you're buying it try and buy local produce. Curiously, I've seen some authentic recipes that include no garlic at all. The 1 part out of 16 or 32 or whatever of me that is French is deeply disturbed by this.
cooking liquids other than passata or the juice from a can of tomatoes
Well, you have to make that liquid content up somehow. Adrian Richardson cooks his bolognese, which is very good, almost entirely in passata. It makes for a very rich sauce that has metric fuckloads of flavour and texture and general goodness. Still, though, there are options.
First up: water. No. Really. Don't.
Second: stock. Ideally you have something home made--a generic brown stock, beef stock, veal stock, even a chicken stock--you can use and maybe even jack with demi-glace but some store bought stocks will do in a pinch. Read the label carefully. Some are just basically tubs of stock cubes dissolved in water: you may as well pay 60 cents for a stick of Maggi's dried crap. Even the better products, tho', like the tetra packs sold in decent butchers and such, aren't as good (either in terms of flavour or texture--homemade stock usually has a higher gelatine content) as the homemade stuff. Perhaps it's something to do with being made to be shelf stable.
Thirdly: wine. A lot of non-Italian recipes use red wine, but a lot of Italian recipes use white wine. I don't know enough about wine to know what's best here. You can either deglaze the pan with wine after browning the meat and let the wine reduce or just add it with the other liquid(s). I'm told not to reduce red wine a crazy amount as you end up with something that's a bit like Vegemite. Whatever you use, I'd argue that you don't need a huge amount of wine and that, too, if you use wine you need to use decent wine. That old rule about not cooking with a wine you wouldn't drink? It's very sensible.
Finally: milk. Yes. Milk. This is something done in Bologna and it's not a totally crazy idea, given people--including the French with their fancy pants-sounding lait--cook great lumps of pork in milk. Milk tends to be used in conjunction with wine and stock. Milk and I aren't the best of friends, so I haven't actually tried using milk in bolognese (altho' I have cooked a shoulder of pork in milk--it was okay).
herbs and spices
Are herbs an essential ingredient? Well, yes and no. If you have access to fresh herbs--rosemary, thyme, sage, basil, parsley, bay--there is no good reason not to use them. Generally and all, woody herbs go in near the start of the cooking process (altho' you can add more at the end) as they'll withstand having the utter shit cooked out of them better than softer herbs like basil and parsley. Basil goes so well with bolognese/ragu, especially if you favour a variant heavy on tomatoes, but it must go in at the last minute. If you're adding herbs you don't particularly want to eat--parsley stalks, rosemary and so on--then a very sensible thing to do would be to either tie them in a neat bundle with kitchen string or, given plant matter tends to fall apart after a few hours in bubbling liquid, a muslin bag.
If you grow herbs or can get them from someone who grows them, you're in business. If you're buying them you're in a bit of trouble: most 'fresh' herbs sold in supermarkets and grocers just aren't. They might smell okay, maybe, but the flavour is long gone. Next time you go to buy herbs, tear off a leave and put it in your mouth. If it tastes like fucking grass clippings, as so many store bought herbs so, don't waste your money.
As for dried herbs, dried bay leaves are maybe okay, but otherwise avoid them. They give a tea-like taste to stuff, which you really don't want, and really aren't so nice. If you can't get the good fresh stuff, it's best to go without.
Small quantities of fresh chilli have a place in ragu. The idea isn't to make a hot sauce but to pep it up a little. Add it, finely diced, with the garlic.
Finally, consider throwing a pod or two of star anise to your muslin bag of fresh herbs. Star anise, as Heston Blumenthal taught me, really brings out the meaty flavour of meat. Such small quantities won't give the dish any noticeable aniseed flavours.
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