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basil, comfort food, cooking, easy cooking, easy dinner, easy dinners, easy pasta, eat, entertaining, fall dishes, food, fresh, fresh cooking, fresh pasta, gluten free, instant pot, italian, Italy, kid friendly, make ahead meals, Parmesan, pasta, penne, pork, quick cooking, sauce, sausage, simple entertaining, spaghetti, sugar, veal
I can’t say enough good things about my Instant Pot. I bought the 8 quart one this winter and I can’t get enough of it.
I typically make my bolognese sauce on the stove and it takes roughly 6 hours on a slow simmer to come out perfectly.
Using my instant pot it took 35 minutes on high pressure and viola my sauce is ready!
The sauté feature is a huge time and prep saver as you can sauté in the actual pot.
The key to this sauce is the meat ratio and I blitz all the vegetable in the food processor before I add it into the meat. This bolognese sauce is more of a ragu than your typical spaghetti sauce. Also another tip I don’t use beef, I only use veal and pork and prom sausage. This makes the sauce much more mild.
What you need:
- 1 1/2 pounds ground pork
- 1 1/2 pounds ground veal
- 1 pound Italian sausage meat (casing removed)
- 1 large white onion
- 2 carrots
- 3 celery heart stalks
- 4 garlic cloves
- 3/4 cups of sundried tomatoes
- 1 huge handful of fresh basil
- 2 tsp salt
- 2 tsp sugar
- 1 28 oz can tomato purée (try to find San Marizano tomatoes)
- 1 16 oz can of diced tomatoes
- Parmesan rind
- Dried Bay leaves (4)
- 1/3 red wine
- Splash of heavy cream
In a food processor add all the vegetables and basil and sun dried tomatoes. Blitz until their are no chunks and you have a very finely diced mixture. Set aside.
Plug in your Instant pot and press the sauté button – it will take a few minutes and it will beep and say hot.
Start sautéing the sausage meat so some of the fat renders down, once crumbly add the ground pork and cook down and then add the veal. This whole process will take about 10 minutes to brown the meat.
Once no longer pink, add in the onion, carrot, celery, garlic, basil and sundried tomatoe purée. Cook for an additional 5 minutes. Then add in the 2 cans of tomatoes, salt and sugar and bay leaves. Throw in the Parmesan rind and 1/3 cup of good red wine.
Put on the top of the Instant pot, press the meat/stew button (35 mins on high pressure) and sit back and relax! It will take about 5 minutes to come up to high pressure and then the timer will start counting down. Once it is finished, the Instant pot will shut off automatically.
This sauce usually simmers on my stove for 4-6 hours. With this instant pot it now only takes 45 minutes!
Typically a Bolognese sauce is served with a wider pasta noodle but you can serve it on whenever noodle you desire. Before serving add a splash of cream to the sauce. I can’t explain what it does to the sauce but it makes it amazing and rounds out all the meat and tomato flavour.
This sauce freezes amazingly well (do not add the cream before you freeze it) and this recipe will give you roughly 10~12 cups.
Mangia!
