Last Friday night Cookie Monster and I decided to do something different — make our own white bolognese sauce and pasta. We bought a pasta maker last summer and never got a chance to use it. I think we were slightly intimidated and thus put it off. I wanted a white bolognese in an effort to mimic Dell Anima’s but because we swapped out some items the color wasn’t totally white.
For white bolognese sauce, we took fennel, celery, carrots (should have been parsnips), onion and garlic and buzzed it in the food processor so it was the same size as the ground meat. With 3 tbs of butter, I sauteed 1 lb of veal and 1 lb of pork until brown. Remove the meat and put the vegetables in the meat/butter liquid and sautee till tender – don’t forget to add salt and pepper. Then add back the cooked meat and combine with the cooked vegetables. I also added a tablespoon of tomato paste for depth of flavor. Add 2 cups of white wine and reduce till almost all gone. Then add 3 cups of beef broth, 3-4 leaves of sage and reduce until all gone. If you truly want white bolognese, use parsnips instead of carrots, use chicken stock instead of beef and don’t put in tomato paste.
NOTE: it is a good idea to season the sauce after everything has started to really reduce down. The reducing of liquid really intensifies all the flavors and any salt in the beef broth.
Cooking the meat and vegetables for so long in all that liquid creates an incredibly tender and full bodied sauce. It took about 3 hours total. TONS OF FLAVOR. Here is a shot:
The meat was really really soft and the vegetables had practically melted away. The reduced wine and beef stock added deeper elements to this sauce. It was amazing.
Close up:
Again, if you remove the ingredients with pigment, you’ll have a truly white sauce.
While all this was simmering, we got to the task of rolling out our own pasta. It was a simple recipe of 3 1/2 cups of flour and 5-7 eggs. You want to keep adding eggs or water to the dough while you are kneading to ensure it’s not super dry. Turns out I was better at kneading the dough than Cookie Monster. Mine came out pretty darn great!
After rolling it through the pasta press and cutting it into long thick strips of papardelle, we laid them out to dry.
They cook up quick and turns out a pound of dough makes a TON of pasta. We ate it for three days!
The final product after we hit it with some grated parmesan:
Honestly it was so good. It tasted just as good as Dell Anima’s although not exactly the same! The consistency was spot on though – from the tenderness of the ground meat to the bite of the pasta. I think next time, I’ll use less white wine in the sauce, maybe just a cup or a wine not so fruity, and add more butter to get it more like Dell Anima’s.
This was quite a success and it’s quite easy..just make sure you give yourself several hours. I would say this recipe easily feeds 6 people, depending on appetites.
