Bolognese Recipe Fish Sauce

Kenji is the former culinary director for Serious Eats and a current culinary consultant for the site. He is also a New York Times food columnist and the author of The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science.

If there's one thing I miss most about New York (aside from the pizza, that is), it's the cold, snowy winters. Not just because I love the cold and snow days (I do!), but more because those cold, frosty days make meaty, slow-cooked, rib-sticking winter dishes all the more delicious. And there's no dish meatier or more satisfying than a big pot of ragù Bolognese.

It's an almost Pavlovian reaction for me: As soon as I see the first snowflakes of winter, my feet work their way toward the butcher counter, my arms reach for my biggest Dutch oven, and my fingers make a beeline for that wooden spoon. (How to let all three do this at the same time is something that my brain has yet to work out.)

Traditional Spaghetti Bolognese

Ragù Bolognese is the kind of dish I make in vast quantities, jar up, and ship off to family members. It's the kind of dish I'll taste for seasoning, then taste again, then again, and perhaps one more time to be sure, and before I know it, I've eaten a couple servings straight out of the pot and ruined my appetite, only to discover that, nope, my appetite for Bolognese is still alive and kicking once it hits the dinner table.

 ragù.* This slow-cooked meat sauce is almost entirely composed of meat, with just a small amount of wine, stock, tomato, and dairy to bind it together. That spaghetti Bolognese you get in Little Italy or a UK pub, made with ground beef simmered in marinara sauce, may be tasty, but it's an entirely different beast.

*Of course, even saying true ragù are fighting words. Depending on whom you ask, whether it's a cook in Bologna orThe Silver Spooncookbook, recipes vary widely. But all agree the sauce should be meat-forward, with minor extra ingredients to enhance—not compete with—that meat.

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My love of Bolognese all started back when I was a line cook atNo. 9 Park, Barbara Lynch's flagship Northern Italian New American restaurant in Boston. One of my jobs every morning, all through the winter, was to pull out the giant rondeau that fit over four burners and make a batch of ragù Bolognese for the next night's service. (We

Let it sit at least one night in the walk-in, for better flavor.) I'd carefully brown three different types of ground meat while sautéing onions, carrots, celery, sage leaves, and chicken livers in a separate pan. I'd mix the two together, then simmer them all down with a mixture of veal and chicken stock, milk, wine, and just a touch of tomato.

A few hours later, it would reduce to a velvety-smooth sauce, so rich and hearty that only the fattest swaths of fresh pappardelle or tagliatelle could stand up to it.

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Over the years, I've tweaked and refined that Bolognese recipe, testing out every variable I can think of to improve its flavor and texture and align them a bit more with my own personal tastes. I've come up with a number of variations on the theme, including thisNo-Holds-Barred Lasagna Bolognese.

Recently I discoveredthe oven is the best way to make a rich, full-flavored slow-cooked tomato sauce. What if I were to employ that same technique with my Bolognese recipe?

Bolognese is a meat sauce and the choice of meats is one of the most important elements. At No. 9 Park, Lynch used a combination of coarsely ground veal, pork, and lamb. Why? Veal is rich in gelatin, but low in flavor. It gives the finished sauce a silky, smooth texture. Pork is high in fat, with a moderate amount of flavor. That fat emulsifies nicely into the finished sauce. Finally, lamb has a ton of flavor, but a rather coarse texture. By combining all three, you get a mixture that's flavorful, fatty, and silky—just like you want in meatballs or meatloaf.

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But I always wondered: Since veal is pretty bland (not to mention expensive and difficult to find), is there a better way to get both gelatin 

 flavor into the mix? I knew if I got rid of it, I'd have to find an alternative source of gelatin. This was compounded by the fact that while the original recipe uses gelatin-rich veal bone stock, I pretty much 

 have anything but chicken stock at home, and I'm not about to spend a day making veal stock for a recipe that takes four hours on its own.

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I tried following the exact same recipe, but replacing veal with ground beef and using 100% chicken stock. It was more flavorful, but the sauce lacked its classic silkiness. The solution? Just add that gelatin on its own.

Six full packets of gelatin, bloomed in thin store-bought chicken stock, brought enough body that it was an improvement over a veal stock–fortified version. Ground beef improved the flavor, and pancetta, an ingredient common in many ragù recipes, brought even more flavor.

What advantages does pancetta offer over plain old ground pork? Cured meat products are a more concentrated source of glutamic and inosinic acids. Glutamic acid—available in commercial form as MSG powder—is the organic compound found in cured meats, cheeses, and seafood, that's largely responsible for making things taste umami (a.k.a. savory), while inosinic acid acts as a backup singer, increasing glutamic acid's effects.

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I tried incorporating pancetta in various ways: grinding it, finely chopping it in a food processor, and adding a simple dice. The third method is the easiest, and melts into the sauce as it cooks.

In the original No. 9 Park recipe, the meat is cooked in a separate pan from the vegetables. This kind of compartmentalized cooking is pretty common in a restaurant kitchen, as cooking like with like—meat with meat and veg with veg—gives you immediate control over how much those ingredients are cooked when working in large batches.

I'm not a fan of retaining unnecessary restaurant techniques for home use, but in this case, it works well, especially since I like to make my ragù in large batches.

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Pin, if you will (sorry): chicken livers. It's an ingredient that Pellegrino Artusi recommended in his 1891 cookbookScience in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well, which includes one of the first printed recipes for ragù Bolognese. Chicken livers don't make it into many modern recipes.

Liver adds flavor and depth to the sauce in a way that sits in the background. Nobody who tastes the sauce would ever suspect that there are livers in it—unless they happen to bite into a chunk of one.

In the restaurant, I'd carefully clean and trim the veins and connective tissue from each liver before finely chopping them all by hand. Now I find it easier to blend them into a smooth puréeusing an immersion blender.

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Now we get to the most contentious element in any ragù Bolognese recipe: the liquid. Do we use wine? White or red? What about milk? Does it really keep the meat tender? What about tomatoes?

It makes almost no difference whether you use red or white. So long as you're starting with something dry and relatively oak-free, the color of the wine has little impact on the final flavor or appearance of the finished sauce.

's classic recipe calls for no other liquid than some tomato paste and water or stock to thin it out. I prefer to use canned peeled whole tomatoes, preferably high-quality ones, like imported Italian D.O.P. San Marzanos.

My Family's Favorite Pesto Pasta Bolognese.

The gelatin-enriched stock makes up the bulk of the liquid. As that stock reduces, it becomes more intense in both flavor and texture.

 controversial. Almost all modern recipes for ragù Bolognese call for dairy in one form or another, whether it's milk or cream. What 

 controversial is exactly what effect dairy has. Many sources claim that adding milk to the pot at the beginning of the cooking process helps keep the meat tender, though very few offer an explanation as to why.

Roasted Cauliflower Bolognese.

Why does milk make meat tender? Browning adds flavor, but it also causes the protein molecules in ground meat to denature. As the proteins unwind, they link up to create a tighter network and squeeze out some of the water in the meat. Long simmering allows some of that liquid to be reabsorbed. But if you skip the browning and cook the meat in milk (or any other liquid) at the outset, you limit the temperature of the meat to about 212 degrees. As a result, meat cooked in milk does not dry out and toughen but remains tender.

If you read it closely, you'll realize that, at best, the section should probably be retitled Why does meat cooked in any liquid stay more tender than meat that you brown?

I prefer to get my science the old-fashioned way: through ordinary experimenting. I cooked up a few batches of ragù using different ratios of liquids, from 100% milk to 100% stock. Turns out, the liquid you cook the meat in has absolutely no bearing on how tender

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