Since a few weeks we’re having the pleasure to work with Pamela, our extremely helpful Italian intern.

The very moment we found out she comes from a little town close to Bologna, we knew we needed to hear all she had to say about one of the world’s most loved pasta sauces: Bolognese!

Here is her story….

My bolognese story

Sundays always remind me of home, a small village nested in the Italian hills near Bologna. I can almost smell the same aroma of Ragu’ alla Bolognese (bolognese sauce) that I used to wake up to. It was so rich and intriguing. My grandma Laura woke up at 7 am every Sunday to cook her bolognese sauce.

“According to the tradition, the real bolognese sauce cannot take less than 4 hours to cook” – she told me. This is why this sauce is the queen of all the sauces. I still cook it as a treat but I also discovered healthy and delicious alternatives to using meat.

Grandma Laura’s bolognese sauce

My grandmother used to be the master chef in my family and I was her little helper! I loved that job so much. I learned all her recipes and her secrets to make the most delicious Italian dishes. This is why now I am so proud to be able to share my knowledge on how to make an amazing bolognese sauce.

Grandma Laura’s recipe is quite fatty and all about taste. It is a mix of beef, veal mince and 1/2 pancetta (Italian bacon), soffritto (or Mirepoix), all beautifully amalgamated with homemade tomato passata.

The procedure and all the tricks!

She started the procedure by dicing the bacon and frying it with olive oil and butter and added the vegetables afterwards. This was her trick to give the ‘greens’ the maximum taste. After all the vegetables were golden, she added the beef and veal mince mix and stir-fried it for 10 minutes. My task was to add a glass of white wine, to smoothen the flavours and to reduce the fat content a little! After the wine had evaporated, there was another trick to be done. I had to add a glass of full fat milk to moisten the meat texture. My nan was in charge of the last step, adding the right quantity of her homemade tomato passata. She let the sauce cook gently at low temperature for at least 4 hours, stirring it from time to time.

She was cooking this sauce as an ingredient of her tagliatelle with bolognese sauce, my family’s favourite Sunday lunch.

Switching from meat to legumes 

As an adult with passion for good food and a healthy lifestyle, I discovered natural alternatives to using meat to cook my grandma’s bolognese sauce.

The secret for great, rich sauces without the need to add meat is Umami, the 5th taste!

This taste is hard to describe and hard to recognise, but it is very high, for example, in meat and some people would describe umami exactly as a “meaty” flavour. The good news is that there are a lot of healthy and delicious foods that are high in umami too, and playing with these can be extremely fun and bring to very surprising results.

A meatless bolognese: do you accept the challenge? You can of course keep tomato sauce as the base: you’ll be happy to know that tomato is also a food rich in Umami taste! Lentils or soy beans, mushrooms, nori seaweed and much more… how do you make your meatless bolognese sauce?