I've cooked many versions of bolognese sauce. I've tried different meats and different combinations of meat. Different vegetable bases. Different ratios of tomatoes to stock to wine. The most significant difference between Larousse Gastronomique's bolognese and the others I've cooked before is the use of fresh tomatoes. I've always used canned tomatoes, tomato passata, tomato paste or combinations thereof. Too, I often use some kind of cured pork product. Bacon or pancetta, usually. Larousse Gastronomique's recipe doesn't call for any such products. Nor does it call for mince. It falls for coarsely chopped chuck steak. I've used this before and found that while it is time consuming to mince your the meat by hand, as you would for steak tartare, it offers a superior flavour and texture to store-bought mince.
I like bolognese. Perhaps it's my favourite dish overall. It takes me back to my childhood. Back to my dad making bolognese--maybe the one thing he could cook successfully--using supermarket mince, tomato paste, Vegemite and curry powder. He'd cook it for however long seemed right, use whatever quantity of mince my mum had left over from making rissoles the night before. We'd eat it with spaghetti and pre-grated tasty cheese and store-bought garlic bread.
The process for making Larousse Gastronomique's bolognese is similar to most other recipes. You brown the meat (500 grams) and then remove it from the pan. You then fry onion (5 large onions; chopped), celery (4 stalks; chopped) and then some garlic (4-5 cloves; minced). 10 tomatoes (peeled; crushed) are added to the pot and stewed for 10 minutes. The meat is then returned to the pan. The liquid component takes the form of 250 mL wine and 350 mL of beef stock. A bouquet garni is fashioned using the regular ingredients and a small sprig each of sage and rosemary. To the herbs I added a length of the tomato vine: in McGee's Food & Cooking it was mentioned that tomato vines add aroma to tomato sauces. The sauce must be cooked for at least two hours.
72. Bechamel sauce
Bechamel sauce is, I understand, one of the mother sauces of classical French cookery. With it you can do many a delicious thing. Say what you will about this sauce, how old school it is--thickened with a roux--but I like it. To me, lasagne made with creme fraiche or ricotta or anything else just isn't the same.
There's little to no variation in bechamel recipes. It's as simple as sauces get. You infuse 500 mL of milk with some mace (substitute nutmeg), onion and bay for half a hour before straining it. You then make a roux using 40 grams each of melted butter and plain flour. Once the roux is smooth you slowly stir in the milk and simmer the sauce, stirring gently, until it thickens. You then season it with salt, pepper and perhaps some grated nutmeg.
73. Cooking pasta
This is maybe the first Larousse Gastronomique recipe I came across that wasn't helpful. I know I have to cook pasta in boiling, salted water. I get that. Thing is, I've never cooked fresh pasta before. I understand that cooked fresh pasta has a different texture to cooked dry pasta. I understand it takes much less time to cook. What I don't know is how long it takes to cook. At all. I decided it'd be better to undercook rather than overcook it, given the liquid component of the lasagne--the bolognese and the bechamel--would cook the pasta further in the oven.
74. Lasagne with bolognese sauce
Once you have all you components--the bechamel, the bolognese and the cooked pasta--you layer them in a dish in the following order: bolognese, pasta, bechamel. You finish with bechamel and then top the lasagne with grated Parmesan cheese. The lasagne is baked for half a hour at 200 degrees Celcius.
I was somewhat concerned about how thick I should roll the pasta. My pasta roller has numerous settings (annoyingly, the numbers on the side of the unit don't correspond to any metric measurements I'm aware of). I opted for a thickness of roughly a millimetre as I was concerned the sheets would tear too easily if I rolled them any thinner.
The results were okay, overall. The sauce has a nice texture. As for the pasta, it's much better than the dried, no-cook lasagne sheets I've used before. I'm happy with it given it's the first time I've successfully made fresh pasta.
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