Ok, there is a secret to really good bolognaise, its not an amazing secret but it is the key to success –  slow cooking, it is fundamental that it is cooked low and slow for at least a couple of hours to let the flavour develop and the mince to loose that horrid, hard, gristly texture it can sometimes have.

You’ll also notice that I don’t go in for adding vegetables and tonnes of over store cupboard favourites – its a meat sauce so lets focus on that although I won’t hold it against you if you chuck in a mushroom or courgette.

PS – I cook mine with lamb mince as I believe it has a better flavour but obvs you don’t have to 🙂

Ingredients

Oil (I use Canola or Olive)
1 onion, diced
2 cloves of garlic, crushed (optional)
500g lamb mince
1 a can of tomato purée (the small tin cans you can get)
1 glass of red wine
Lamb stock cube
½ – 1 cup Water

Method

Heat the oil and add the onion and garlic (if using) and cook on a medium heat for 5 minutes or so.

Add the mince and let it get really very brown and cooked. Not adding too much to the pan at once will help here as the more you add the more juices are released and what you really want here is a dry pan for the mince to get brown instead of grey.

Add the red wine and let that cook out.

Add tomato puree – it will look quite red and tomato-ey but don’t be worried.

Add your lamb stock cube and some water, give it a good stir

Leave it for as long as you can up to a max of 3 hours – this’ll make the meat really soft and yummy. Keep checking that its not sticking on the bottom of the pan and add more water if it is.

Serve it with Rigatoni instead of spaghetti – it soaks up more of the sauce

Let me know how you get on 🙂