Vegan Bolognese sauce, easy, cheap and delicious. I’ve got lentil cans to stop a train and I’ve been wanting to make some traditional vegan meat recipes for a while, but adding the difficulty of not using tofu, or seitan.
Taking ideas from recipes circulating on the internet, I saw that the animal protein substitutes most often used in these cases are nuts, mushrooms and lentils. So what have I done: To the vegetable base of the traditional bolognese I have added all these ingredients, let’s see what happens. If it didn’t come out, I would eat it, not publish it and nothing would happen here. The result is spectacular!
1.- Even my husband, a very carnivorous man and not very fond of making up canonical recipes from his country’s cuisine, has gone crazy.
2.- I used 2 cans from the pantry in a more fun way and it worked out better than usual.
As ragout is normally associated with pasta, here I have suggested it with pappardelle, but it could be given the same thousand uses as any fried food: with rice, with zucchini noodles, as a filling for arancini or supplì, mixed with boiled and mashed potatoes and then grilled in the oven, etc.
Buon appetito!
Pasta with vegan bolognese sauce
Ingredients
- 500 g Pasta
- 100 g Carrot
- 100 g Celery
- 100 g Onion
- 1 Garlic clove
- 1 Small pot of cooked lentils about 200 g
- 1 Can of mushrooms 180 g approx.
- 7 Nuts 50 g approx
- 1 Can of whole or crushed tomatoes or the same weight in fresh tomatoes approx. 400 g
- 4 tbsp Triple tomato concentrate optional
- 1 Glass of vegetable stock or water
- ½ Glass of red wine
- 4 tbsp Virgin olive oil
- Black pepper
- 1 Bay leaf
- Salt
Instructions
- Chop the onion, carrot and celery very small
- Chop the nuts and mushrooms without overdoing it. It should not be mashed, but minimally whole, as its main function is to give the sauce a texture similar to that of the meat in the original recipe that gives the dish its name
- Pour the oil into the pan and brown the garlic clove
- Add the chopped onion and stir-fry for 5 minutes
- Add the carrot and celery. Fry everything together until it starts to take color over a moderate heat
- Turn up the heat a little, add the chopped nuts and mushrooms and stir-fry until the mushrooms lose all their water
- Add the wine
- When the alcohol has evaporated, add the tomato concentrate to the sauce, previously diluted in the glass of water or broth, the tomato and the bay leaf
- Add a little salt to taste (a teaspoon of coffee) and let the ragout fry for 1 and a half hours over a very low heat, adding a little broth or water if it is sticking or running out of juice completely
- Taste and adjust and salt and pepper to taste
- Boil the pasta
- Once it is al dente, strain and mix well with the sauce along with half a scoop of pasta cooking water
- Optional for vegans: You can top off the invention with some grated vegan cheese on top
- Optional for vegetarians: If you want to add a teaspoon of butter and grated parmesan to the pasta already with the ragù, it is very tasty