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Title: Spaghetti Bolognese don’t exist!!1!
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(yes, the exclamation marks are correct 😉)Spaghetti Bolognese: Everyone knows them… except Italians.An imaginary dish, .. just like square root of -1, or like a word which doesn’t exist... just uselesserRight, read it again if you don’t believe me… in Italy we don’t prepare that kind of pasta.What the hell, you may be wondering… Italy is famous for spaghetti and bolognese sauce (that we call “ragù alla bolognese” or simply ragù, (from ragoût), but we would never mix these two things in the same dish).Why oh why, you may as well think? I think the reason can be found in two ways.First, they come from two different cultures. Spaghetti come from the south, where a simpler tomato, basil, and veg sauce would seem more appropriate.Second, spaghetti are slippery, so they’re not as good to ‘retain’ a demanding sauce as a beef ragù is. As every bolognese person can tell you, appropriate pastas for bolognese ragù can be: tagliatelle (first choice), pennette/penne/mezzepenne, conchiglie, fusilli, maccheroni, … in general every form of ‘pasta rigata’ (ribbed pasta). Pasta rigata is a pasta that is not smooth, so thas sauce is more likely to stay with the pasta, instead of slipping down. I think the main reason why every person from Bologna is horrified by the mere idea of associating spaghetti with our proud ragù is that we perfectly know (because everyone has made that mistake once in their life) what happens if you do that: spaghetti would ruthlessly come up your fork completely naked of any red or meaty trace… just to leave a gloomy surprise in the very end: a bloody pool of meat and tomato just looking at you as if asking “Now what?”. And unless you are Italian, you don’t know what scarpetta is. but that’s another story.What does wikipedia say?As Wikipedia (as of 19dec09) says about Bolognese_sauce:[…] Bolognese sauce known in Italian as ragù alla bolognese, pronounced [, ragù bolognese, or simply ragù) is a meat-based sauce in Italian cuisine, typical of the city of Bologna. It is customarily used to dress tagliatelle al ragù and to prepare lasagne alla bolognese.Italian ragù alla bolognese is a slowly cooked meat-based sauce, and its preparation involves several techniques, including sweating, sautéing and braising. Ingredients include a characteristic soffritto of onion, celery and carrot, different types of minced or finely chopped beef, often alongside small amounts of fatty pork. White wine, milk, and a small amount of tomato paste or tomatoes are added, and the dish is then gently simmered at length to produce a thick sauce.Outside Italy, the phrase “Bolognese sauce” is often used to refer to a tomato-based sauce to which minced meat has been added; such sauces typically bear little resemblance to the Italian ragù alla bolognese, being more similar in fact to the ragù alla napoletana from the tomato-rich south of the country. Although in Italy ragù alla bolognese is not used with spaghetti (but rather with flat pasta, like tagliatelle),[2][3][4] so-called “spaghetti bolognese” has become a popular dish in many other parts of the world.[whereI’m not Italian: what can we do to comply?If you weren’t born with the privilege of 🇮🇹 Italianity, I’ve built a software for you to teach you the proper abbinamenti (couplings) between pastas and sauces.It’s simple, install my app from github: https://github.com/palladius/pastaIt’s written in Ruby on Rails (of course), it’s fully Dockerized, and features a beautiful matrix of pastas/sauces:The code which defined good condiments is here, under db/seeds.rb .
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Author: Riccardo Carlesso
PublishedDate: 2023-04-21
Category: Blogs
NewsPaper: Riccardo Carlesso - Medium