BigV wrote:
no sofrito? or as I learned it, the "holy trinity" of the italian kitchen, the mirepoix of the south?
What makes you say that?
But -technically- no, because sofrito is Spanish/Hispanic, and generally contains peppers, to which I am highly allergic and which have no place in a Bolognese sauce. Also I am not "from the south" in either of my countries.
But perhaps you meant the Italian soffritto, which is basically a standard mirepoix, to which the answer would be yes, kinda, because I cook from scratch scratch, so I chop and cook those ingredients as part of the process. there is no jar labelled "soffritto" in my fridge. The only thing that went in that had an ingredients list with more than one item on it was the concentrated tomato puree/paste because that has tomatoes and salt. On this occasion, I did not use celery even though I have plenty because I couldn't be arsed. You really thought that was just meat and tomatoes????????
lean-ish ground beef -a fuckton
bacon, finely diced, any huge globs of fat removed -enough
petite-diced canned tomatoes (no other ingredients) -5 cans I think
tomato paste/puree from a tube (added salt) -enough
finely chopped onions cooked two ways -enough
fresh garlic by the truckload, crushed (I told it I didn't love it any more and was running away with the chives)
fresh ground black pepper and sea salt
super-finely chopped fresh oregano from a pot on my deck
dried flaked oregano, shaken then stirred
carrots, finely diced -the rest of the old bag
mushrooms, medium diced -all but the huge one I'm saving for weekend special breakfast
olive oil -enough
not necessarily in that order
I think that's it. I've been making this since I was maybe 8, with a brief respite of -say- 23 years, after I taught beest (who actually enjoyed cooking) how to make it, so I don't really think about it in "recipe" terms. It gets made when we run low in the freezer and leanish ground beef is on a good sale. And then it gets eaten for dinner that night, some is saved in the fridge for a few days later, and most goes in gallon bags in the freezer, laid flat to be only a couple centimeters thick at most with marked thinner lines approximately indicating portions so we can snap off however much we want and defrost it when we need it.