Strozzapretti with Vegan Bolognesa Sauce

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Strozzapretti with Vegan Bolognesa Sauce

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4
Calories/serving: —Protein/serving: —Fat: —Carbs: —Fiber: —Sugars: —Sodium: —Iron: —

Ingredients

    For the pasta

  • 400grams semolina flour
  • 152grams water
  • 4tbsp olive oil

    • For the vegan sauce - Aromatics

  • 1medium yellow onion
  • 1red bell pepper
  • 4medium cloves garlic

    • Main ingredients

  • 2cups Beyond crumbled meat (you can substitute for crimini mushrooms, chopped very fine resembling ground meat)
  • 2cups red wine
  • 2cups vegetable stock
  • 2cups canned or bottled really good quality tomatoes, such as DOP San Marzano's or Mutti passata di pomodoro

    • Herbs and Condiments

  • 10sprigs thyme
  • 2large bay leaves
  • 1tbsp Kosher Salt

Instructions

Begin

1Begin your cooking session by making the sauce. It takes time for all the ingredients to exchange flavors with one another, resulting in rich, complex flavors.

Prep

2Fine dice the onions and the bell peppers.
3Mince the garlic.
4If your tomatoes are canned, blend them until liquid.

Sauce

5Add a bit of olive oil to cover the bottom of your pan.
6Turn heat up to medium low.
7Sweat the onions and bell peppers with a pinch of salt. The salt will help in releasing water from inside the vegetable cells, with the goal of concentrating their flavors. We are not looking to brown these ingredients, just getting them more flavorful. Do not go by time, but rather look at your ingredients and see how they transform. They are done when softer and shiny. The onions will also be translucent.
8Push the aromatics to the sides of your pan, add a little bit more olive oil in the center, and cook your garlic in this area for about 10 seconds. Mix with the rest of the aromatics. Mix everything together.
9Add the meat or the mushrooms to the pan, and cook thoroughly at high heat until thoroughly cooked. In the past, when using non vegan meat, I would allow the beef to brown very thoroughly and create a glaze in the bottom of the pan. Trying to do this with vegan meat ends up with a burn taste that was not pleasant.
10Once the meat is cooked add the wine and allow the alcohol evaporate. Judge this using your sense of smell.
11Add the vegetable stock and the tomatoes.
12Add the thyme and the bay leaves.
13Stir everything and adjust your heat so the sauce simmers.
14Let the sauce simmer for at least 1 hour, tasting and stirring occasionally, adding a bit of salt about half way through cooking.
15Your sauce will become richer and thicker.
16Adjust the salt level to your taste.
17Remove the herbs and get ready to cook the pasta.

Pasta

18Measure the water and the semolina flour in grams and place them in separate bowls.
19Add 1/2 of the semolina to the water, mixing with a large spoon.
20Add all the olive oil to this mixture.
21Add the rest of the water and mix thoroughly, this time using your hands so you can judge the texture and feel of the dough. It should not be sticky as this would cause the individual noodles to stick to each other, but it should not feel too dry either. If it is too dry, you can add small amounts of water and olive oil. You will get a better intuition of what to look for after you've made this a couple of times.
22Cover the dough so it does not dry up.
23You will be working with small pieces of dough at a time, a little bigger than a golf ball.
24Outfit your extruder with the proper dye: s shaped for strozzapretti, hollow for bucatini.
25Feed your dough one piece at a time through the extruder, pushing into the feeder with your fingers on one hand, cranking the handle with the other hand.
26Cut the noodles with a sharp knife once they are the proper length. Traditional strozzapretti are about 2 inches long. You can make them shorter or longer, as you desire.
27Place them on a parchment paper lined cookie sheet making sure they are apart from each other so they do not stick. Sprinkle some semolina on top and make sure to shake the pan once in a while to prevent sticking.

Cooking the pasta

28Fill a medium to large size pot with water. Salt the water heavily. The water should taste like the ocean.
29Transfer some of sauce to another medium size pan, or a small wok.
30Put the pasta in the salted water and cook until it floats to the surface. Taste the pasta to achieve the level of doneness that you want.
31Drain with a slotted spoon or spider strainer and mix in the pan containing the sauce that you separated.
32Cook on medium heat together, while mixing thoroughly either with a spoon or by tossing.
33Serve immediately.

Chef's Notes

The Art of Extrusion

I love making extruded pasta. Using the same dough I can come up with many shapes, suitable for different sauces allowing me to come up with completely new ideas. Extruded pastas are by default vegan, as the only ingredients used are flour and water. The myriad pasta shapes are designed to trap sauce.

The S-Shape Magic

For this strozzapretti, the S shape allows sauce to trap on both sides of the noodle, which creates a wonderful feel as everything comes together in your mouth. This isn't just pasta - it's edible architecture designed for maximum flavor delivery.

Not Your Nonna's Bolognese

Even though we are calling this sauce vegan bolognese, it really is a remote adaptation of the original recipe that takes many different kinds of pork and takes hours to cook. This sauce can be considered a reduction, as we are evaporating water from the different ingredients in many stages: the aromatics, the wine, the broth, the tomatoes.

Protein Alternatives

We can use either a good quality vegan 'meat' (my favorite brand is Beyond, for either meat or sausages), or mushroom duxelles: button or crimini mushrooms chopped fine. Each brings its own character - Beyond for meaty texture, mushrooms for earthy depth.

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