Creamy Bolognese
Have you ever had the desire to spend 3-4 hours making a meat sauce to slather all over some noodles? If the answer is yes, do I have the recipe for you!
In fact, this is actually my second such meat sauce of this nature. Impressively, my Slow Cooker Sunday Sauce takes even LONGER to make! That one’s about 8-10 hours, but what that one has going for it that this one doesn’t is that you can just throw all the ingredients in a slow cooker, turn it on, and walk away. No such luck with this one I’m afraid. But if I’m being honest, this one is a little tastier, and Mike is a HUGE fan of this one. It shocked even me, but he ate this and exclaimed it was the best pasta he’d ever eaten. Like, ever. Home, restaurant, traveling, this pasta trumps it all. I couldn’t tell him what I put in it because he’d lose his marbles, but it is what it is. It will be my little secret for the rest of my life.
I have another quick story that is a wonderful testament of how delicious this sauce is. I was heating up a bowl of this sauce over zucchini noodles on Monday at work in the lunch room. I don’t want to brag, but we recently got our lunch room privileges reinstated. I went almost a full year without being able to use the fridge or the microwave at work, supposedly due to the pandemic. It was the worst. But now I’m back to nuking my lunches and making the whole office jealous. Like I was saying, on Monday I was reheating this sauce and my coworker said how happy she was that we could use the microwave again because she could smell my lunches and everything I bring in always smells so delicious! It was such a nice thing to say and it really made my Monday. So there you have it. There are two people who are big big fans of this recipe and I’m not even counting myself in that figure.
What I love about this sauce is that it starts out with a traditional bolognese sauce base, but it finishes off looking more like a vodka sauce with meat. It’s a little unconventional, especially when you read the ingredients, but once you get the first taste, you’ll be hooked!
Creamy Bolognese
Ingredients
Equipment
Method
- Place a 6 quart Dutch oven over medium heat. Add the avocado oil and the ghee to the pot. Once melted, stir to combine. Add the onion, carrot, and celery to the pot. Add a pinch of sea salt and stir to coat the vegetables. Sauté approx. 8 minutes, until softened and fragrant. Add the garlic, stir to combine, and sauté 3-5 minutes more. Use a slotted spoon to remove the ingredients from the pot and place in a medium bowl.
- Add the bacon pieces to the pot in a single layer and saute 8-10 minutes, stirring occasionally, until starting to brown and crisp on the edges. Use the slotted spoon to remove the bacon and add the pieces to the bowl with the vegetables.
- Place the ground beef and the ground pork in the pot in the two whole pieces that they were packaged as. Add a pinch of sea salt over the meat. Break each into roughly six large chunks, each chunk being approx. 1.5 inches cubed. Saute 1-2 minutes on medium high on all sides until browned. Add the vegetables and bacon back to the pot and pour in the chicken broth. The mixture should be boiling. After 5 minutes, the chicken broth should be mostly evaporated. Pour in the crushed tomatoes and add a pinch of nutmeg. Reduce heat to low to simmer.
- Stir in a hefty pinch of sea salt and fresh ground black pepper. Simmer 2 hours, stirring occasionally (every 15 minutes or so) and monitoring the heat. The sauce should be barely bubbling. After 2 hours, you should notice that the sauce has reduced and thickened considerably.
- Add the cashews, almond milk, nutritional yeast, and a pinch of sea salt to a high speed blender. Blend about 20 seconds until incorporated completely. Pour the mixture into the sauce and stir to incorporate completely. Stir in the parsley. Simmer the sauce 15-20 minutes more on low, stirring occasionally, until thickened to your liking. Serve hot over noodles of choice (I prefer zucchini noodles for Whole30) and enjoy!
