Until recently, I really didn’t know how to cook properly.
One of the things I used to make often was spaghetti bolognese. It was high in protein, fit my diet well, it was reasonably healthy, and so I made it about twice a week. The recipe was very simple: mince, onions, spaghetti, and a bottle of pasta sauce from the store.
Over time I started experimenting. I tried different recipes, added more ingredients, cooked parts separately, and let the sauce simmer longer. Bit by bit it evolved.
Now I make the sauce from scratch, cook the mince in a separate pan, add finely diced carrots and a do a bunch of extra steps I never used to, as well as letting everything simmer for a two hours.
The result is honestly fucking delicious and better than any spaghetti bolognese I’ve had in restaurants.
The problem is that it went from being my easy go-to meal to something that actually takes effort. I used to make it multiple times a week, but now I barely do.
And the worst part is I can’t go back to the old version anymore, because it just tastes disappointing.
I just wanted to rant, I’m frustrated because I want the dish more, but don’t want all of the added effort.
Make a big batch once per week on the weekend and portion it out into easy, freezable individual servings. It can still be your easy go-to meal if you make a week or two worth of sauce all at once. Cook the pasta fresh, reheat your frozen sauce in a microwave, combine and enjoy.
This! Batch cook & enjoy!
Make a bunch and freeze it, now you have premade meals of the good shit whenever you want.
If it doesn’t freeze well as a final product, do the prep and freeze the individual components separately. Later all you have to do is thaw and fry/boil. End result tastes not quite made fresh - you can still tell - but often much better than just freezing and reheating the cooked product.
Huh, I’ve been making marinara for the last 3 summers and it freezes great.
Yeah the marinara is probably not going to change much from being frozen; it’s the meats and veggies I was thinking mostly about.
In OP’s shoes, I’d make a big batch of the the most basic version of the marinara sauce, portion it out and freeze it; then prep the meat and veggies up to being ready to be sauteed and freeze them separately.
When it’s time to cook a meal, thaw out a block of each and get some noodles going, sautee the meat and veggies, mix with the sauce, add the noodle when they’re ready, and nom.
When I do meal prep, that’s usually my approach: don’t cook it up to completion and then freeze (works, but the taste/texture is often a bit off); but prep it up to the last couple of steps so that when my lazy ass gets off of work later in the week, I’m 10 minutes and a single frying pan away from an actually decent meal.
Marinara seems like it would, but some things don’t. I assume they meant freezing stuff separately only when freezing it finished doesnt turn out well
Freezing sauce is fine. I never learned canning when we made sauce from the garden, we sealed and froze.
The noodles cooked in sauce as its final dish, shouldn’t be frozen, no. The texture of the noodles will be wonky.
My advice to Op would be to batch the sauce and freeze it. Make fresh noodles when you use it.
This is the way. I’ve got little frozen containers of spag bol and Mexican beans and mince sitting in the freezer ready for dinner when ever. The trick is to get a giant ass fry pan and just make up a fuck ton of what ever you happen to be cooking and have a bunch of freezer safe containers.
PS. I’m heading to the shop now to buy all the ingredients I need to make this, gota start soon else I’ll eat way too late.
Can’t not make it at least once a week.Can you make a big batch and save some leftovers in the fridge or freezer? I think it’s great that you have perfected it, I’m happy for you.
I’ll try that once, but I doubt it will be the same. My oven & microwave have been broken for like 3 months so I’ve been learning to cook a lot!!
It’s also pretty good for my mental health to have to run to the shop every day and make food, else I just end up on the computer all day.
So I kinda force myself to cook and go to the shops most days
Being in the same situation, I ended up getting some big, silicon “ice cube” trays (if you used them for ice cubes the cubes would be huge). Each slot holds ~a serving of pasta sauce.
We’ll make up batches of sauce and freeze them in these trays. Then you can pop a cube into a saucepan, add some cream (or other liquid base that makes sense for the sauce) and heat it up while you make the pasta.
In my experience it works and tastes great, and makes it super easy for when you don’t have time or energy to cook.
That sounds great, I’ll give that a try
We do that with home made sloppy joe sauce. A muffin cup is perfect for one sloppy joe serving.
We did this with tomato paste, since every recipe that uses it only ever needs 1 tbsp, and it’s sold in… idk, 6 oz? cans… put 1 tbsp dollops into an icecrube tray, froze em, then popped em out and threw them into a plastic bag and right back into the freezer. Now we just grab a tomato cube whenever we need one.
My mother in law makes huge portions of her pasta sauce and freezes it in smaller portions to give to us. Heats up just fine in a pan on the stovetop. It may be a little more watery, but I’m sure you could just simmer a bit longer once it’s up to temp to thicken it out.
You can reheat the sauce in a pan and just boil up some fresh pasta.
Of course it won’t be 100%, but it’ll be 100 times better than your old go-to and just as easy.
When you do the leftovers, pan-fried spaghetti feels very different and is also super delicious. Let it dry out a bit as it cooks, seems like bad instructions, but it’s so good.
Edit: I should note, this starts with the sauce and noodles already mixed. Ideally when put away, so the noodles absorb the sauce over a few days. If your diet allows for it, adding your cooking fat of choice is of course very much recommended for frying in a pan.
You can just heat the bolognese up in a pan after defrosting. It’ll come out the same.
I’ve done exactly this with ragu before, worked perfectly. I don’t own a microwave (don’t see the point in them) so all my stuff is reheated in a pan or the oven.
I hear ya about going to the shop though, I’m in the same boat.
I usually make a massive batch and by morning it is always all gone. You can’t not eat it all. Impossible.
Could you make a double or quadruple sauce recipe and freeze it? Making a bigger batch of bolognese doesn’t take significantly more time and then you can quickly reheat portions and boil the pasta for a quick weeknight meal. If you brown the meat then that would add extra time since you would need to brown one portion of meat at a time, since it will steam rather than brown if you overcrowd the pan.
My wife and I make spaghetti sauce a couple of times a year, but we make it in 2 giant stock pots and start with giant institutional cans of tomato puree and diced tomatoes, then cook and add the ground beef and Italian sausages and seasonings and then measure out portions into vacuum bags and freeze them. It takes twice as long to do those two stock pots compared to maybe two meals worth, but we get 12 meals out of that.
Want spaghetti? Grab a vacuum pack out of the freezer and put it in water to boil on the stove. When it’s defrosted and warmed up, cook the noodles and dinner is ready.
Bolognese is obe of my favorites as well, but it’s like a 4-5 hour process, yeah. Feeds me for a solid week, though, more than anything else I cook.
Why not make it in bulk once a week, enough for a few servings? And I probably don’t need to tell you this… but keep it in the fridge/freezer
Also please share the recipe, I’m interested!
Does it freeze well? When I used to be extra as hell with Bolognese, I would do batch cooking and it went pretty well, especially if I wasn’t super lazy with how I defrosted it.
Probably, but I think it just won’t be the same again
You are correct, putting something in the fridge/ freezer will deepen the flavor, freezing it for later may in fact, work better and you might just end up with something tastier in the long run.
Or can it be canned easily?
Excellent work, that just means you need a new dish to iterate on! And the cycle can continue.
Maybe in future experimentation try to prioritize timeliness? That’s easier said than done though. Your journey with bolognese is similar to mine with shakshuka, so I feel I understand. It’s impossible to turn off my desire to improve things and resulting brainstorms on the topic.
Making my own tortillas has done this to tacos for me. It doesn’t add a ton of complexity, but the extra time takes what was a super fast zero effort process, and now makes it about as involved as any other simple dish to cook. But it’s SO much better that I can never go back.
You can go further. I also make my sauce from scratch, but then pressure cook some beef chuck or shanks in it with red wine. Then I make my own pasta to go with.
And it’s good it takes so long because I would be too fat to make it otherwise.
I’ve once made pasta with a friend who had her own pasta roller (not sure what it’s called), it was a lot of fun. I’m definitely keen of getting one, one day. Adding more effort lol
My own mother cursed me by getting me one for Christmas. Now I can’t stand the stuff from the store.
Its also nice because you get to make stuffed pastas that just don’t exist in normal stores! Love it.
And lasagna with fresh pasta. It’s sooo much better
Sounds nice, I personally like taking time to cook good food. Can we have the recipe?
It’s essentially this: https://youtu.be/HZctds20DfA
I add some chilli because I like it spicy
There’s no prize to perfection, only an end to pursuit
I hear you, but you might be able to decouple the lazy version and the fancy one. I love pasta al pesto. I have the lazy version (sauce from the store, chuck it in) and the fancy version (start with basil…). One is a comfort food in rough times, the other a delicacy I can only savor a handful of times a year. Both are great in their respective roles.
I’m blursed with a weak sense of smell/taste. This can’t happen to me, I would barely be able to tell the two recipes apart. But on the other hand, I’m pretty sure I’m missing a lot of the enjoyment people have with really good food.
Tasting is also a skill. It takes practice and focus to notice these things.
I’m pretty sure in my case it’s either genetic or the result of actual damage to my olfactory nerves.
Simple solution.
Get a big, big pot and make a f%%k ton of sauce once a month.
Get containers and freeze them.
I make chili and lentil soup this way; I’ve got plenty of each sitting in the freezer. I mostly keep it for days I am sick or just don’t feel like cooking.
If you don’t have a good sized freezer check online. You can find one that’s about as much floor space as a chair that holds plenty.
