For me bolognese is the first sauce that comes to mind when thinking about pasta. I usually make this sauce in bulk and freeze a few portions later on for pasta or for lasagne.

Ingredients

For the sauce:

• 800g tomatoes
• 500g minced beef
• 1 onion
• 150g carrots
• 1 garlic clove
• fresh thyme
• 100ml red wine
• 1 bay leave
• 10g sugar
• salt & pepper to taste
• olive oil

To serve:

• fresh oregano
• parmesan

Instructions

Cut the onion, carrots and the thyme and fry them over medium heat in the oil for a few minutes. Add the cut garlic and turn up the heat. Let it fry for a bit but add the meat before the garlic gets golden. Let the meat fry until it changes colour and add the wine. Turn down the heat and add the other ingredients. Let the sauce cock on low heat for a few hours (3-4h). After that I usually end up with a bit less than 1kg bolognese.

If you use it for lasagna it does not matter if it has some excess fluids, though for pasta it should reduce quite a lot in weight. I usually end up with about 1kg of bolognese sauce.

Tips

You can use white wine instead of read one. This will make the bolognese less heavy. I love doing that for pasta, however I do not like it as much in lasagna. There I prefer read wine.