Vegetarian Bolognese Recipe

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Hello and welcome to Freshly Served, the healthy vegan cooking show. I’m Heather and tonight we’re gonna make a mushroom Bolognese sauce.

And you can use this over spaghetti which is the traditional way or you can try it over some whole grains, some millet, some rice or even some soothe vegetables some zucchini would be lovely.

So what I’m gonna show you is just the sauce and we’re gonna start with the mushrooms and I’ve got this mushrooms diced so that they’re just little mushrooms chunks.

Now obviously you’re not really gonna fool anyone with them as an alternative to meat but there’s something a little bit reminiscent about meat with mushrooms. They’ve got a lot of nice nutrients in them including a lot of potassium, great!

So I’ve got a pot heating up here and this is the pot that I’m gonna do the sauce in. All I’m gonna do first is soothe the mushrooms, the onions and the garlic.

Normally onions will go in first followed closely by garlic but with mushrooms they go in first because they take the longest to cook and they also use the most oil. So what you’re gonna do once your pot is heated up; just put some small amount of oil in here, that’s probably about a teaspoon.

Mushrooms take out more than other vegetables, you’re gonna put them right in there. No needs to heat the oil up before you get those in. The purpose of the oil is to coat the mushrooms not the pan.

So stir that in, and it looks like a lot right now but these mushrooms are really gonna shrink down and I tried to think on how many mushrooms you would use, I had twelve mushrooms that were about that big. You can see that? That big!

And what I’m gonna use for the sauce is a canned of tomatoes, so I don’t know, I usually judge how much is in my bag thinking about how big my canned of tomatoes is.

So make sure they all get a little bit of oil on them and then you wanna leave them to cook. Ok, if you keep stirring them, they’re not gonna be able to cook. They cook by having contact with the bottom of the pot. So just let them hang out, you can dice up your onions and your garlic if you haven’t done that already while they cook.

So stir these mushrooms occasionally and I’m at about ten minutes here and I’m not sure if you can see it through the glass on the film but there’s water here that come out from the mushrooms.

Ok, so that’s the first stage of their cooking. They’ve shrunk down quite a bit if you notice but they’re not fully cooked, what we’re waiting is for them to reabsorbed all that juice that they’re giving off right now.

So probably another five minutes here, yes mushrooms take a while to cook especially when you have as much as I have in here.

These guys have actually taken about ten minutes here but they have now reabsorbed their liquid, some of it has probably evaporated, that’s cool too. And they can cook a little bit more if you like, if you have some picky mushroom eaters, cooking it more will make them a lot less noticeable, lot tastier, better texture.

What I’m gonna do is throw the onion and the garlic right in now, mushrooms will get a little bit more of a chance to cook before I throw the tomatoes in and they should be just perfect!

Stir it occasionally, you gotta wait until the onions are nice and soft and the mushrooms will have cook a little more as well and then you’re gonna add your seasonings so I’ve got some oregano, beautiful for pasta sauce.

And by the way if you have someone or if you yourself are very anti mushroom but you want to make a Bolognese sauce, very easy just use tempeh. Just take some tempeh, cube it and put it in the tomato sauce when it’s done.

So you won’t start with the mushroom, you just start with the onions and garlic and make a regular tomato sauce. So herbs are going in, this is some basil and just give it a little squeeze between your fingers as it goes in. Really helps to bring out the flavor of these dried herbs.

And last but not least some marjoram. Oregano, basil, marjoram they are my usual suspects for Italian sauces especially with the tomatoes, so nice!

Alright! So get those herbs stirred around, you want them to infuse into the oil with the onions and the mushrooms so that their flavor gets carried through the dish rather than just getting overpower by the tomatoes which is also why we soothe the mushrooms and the onions before putting the tomatoes in because it really helps to retain their flavor within the sauce rather than just being kind of a blend all over sauce.

This way you get the flavor of the onion, the flavor of the mushrooms and we’re gonna bring it all together but its gonna be individual first so that their flavor will get the chance to come out.

Ok! So this just needs a couple of minutes to come into the oil then I’m going to put a little bit of salt in here and every good Bolognese sauce has a little bit of wine. I never seem to have red wine on hand and I can’t justify buying it for just this little bit that I use it so I’m using white but red much better.

Pour it down there, let it sizzle and it’s gonna bring up all that flavor that’s might have been stuck to the bottom of your pot. Smells nice too!

And you can also take this excuse to pour yourself a glass while you wait for the sauce to finish cooking because all we’re gonna do next is put the tomatoes in here perhaps add a little bit more salt and then let it simmer and you wanna let it simmer as long as you can while you go off and enjoy yourself while you wait for you dinner to get together.

Now I usually go with dice or whole tomatoes from a canned and yes I’m using canned because it’s winter. I don’t like to use the cans of tomatoes sauce; I just don’t like the texture of them.

There’s nothing really bad about them, I just don’t like the texture so I’ve got some whole tomatoes in here and all I’m doing is just breaking those whole tomatoes up with my spoon here. And then it’s nice because you get some chunks of tomatoes, my favourite is diced but for some reason the store doesn’t have any diced just the whole.

You can also cut these before you put it in if you prefer but I definitely like the texture better than those sauces in a can. So like I said, I’m just gonna add a little bit of salt for the tomatoes and then you can let this simmer and the longer you let the tomato sauce simmer the more the flavors gonna come together and the more the flavors gonna come out of those herbs and things.

So let this simmer then you wanna cook some noodles separately. Whole grain noodles will take about ten minutes to cook once the water is boiling and you’re ready to go.

So I hope you enjoy. You can find this recipe at HealthyVeganRecipes.net. I’m Heather and this is Freshly Served.