I follow a lot of chefs on Instagram, and one of the posts I bookmarked was a recipe for a vegetarian bolognese from Chef Eric Ripert. We love bolognese, but this point in the pandemic wasn't really a great time to buy meat for a whole bunch of reasons, so a vegetarian version sounded perfect for a Meatless Monday dinner. Most of the pasta we've been making lately is using sauce from a jar, since pasta has become one of our go-to recipes when we need something quick and convenient, so making this would definitely qualify as making something from scratch that we normally get store-bought. I didn't really think this through until I had already started making the dish, so unfortunately I don't really have a lot of pictures other than the finished product. Also, our counters are cluttered with groceries in various stages of quarantine, so sadly we don't really have much space for ingredient photos anyway.
To make the sauce, you need:
- olive oil ($0.35)
- 1 onion ($0.79)
- about 5 cloves of garlic ($0.20)
- mushrooms ($2.29)
- bell pepper ($1.50)
- tomato ($0.29)
- can of crushed tomatoes ($1.59)
- seasonings: salt, pepper, thyme, oregano, rosemary (his original had herbs de Provence but we got rid of ours recently in our pre-pandemic spice cabinet clean-out) ($0.50)
- pasta ($1.99)
- parmesan cheese ($1)
At an estimated cost of $7.50 for the sauce, it's more than a store-bought sauce would cost us, but we usually do add vegetables and sometimes meatballs to those sauces, so it's not significantly more. The entire thing cost us about $10.50 for dinner for three (with a small bowl of leftovers for lunch), so not bad at all.
It was a pretty simple sauce to make, but just took some time to come together. The first layer of the sauce was the onion, garlic, and seasonings, followed by the mushrooms (until the water evaporated), then the pepper, tomato, and crushed tomatoes, with seasoning adjusted throughout. Once all the ingredients were in and the sauce was simmering, it was time for the pasta which got drizzled with olive oil once drained. The whole thing was topped with parmesan (grated or shredded) at the end. Not as quick and easy as sauce from a jar, but a lot more vegetables!
How did we like the sauce? As a mushroom pasta sauce, pretty good. It was a little light on the seasoning, since I didn't add a ton of salt because it's not great for toddlers, but it tasted healthy and like the vegetables it contained. As a bolognese, it didn't really work for us. For bolognese, we really love that richness and those nuances of flavor that just didn't come through when meat was substituted with mushrooms (at least not the ones we got from Trader Joe's). I think in the future if I wanted to turn a meat sauce vegetarian, I might stick with the meat substitutes, like the beef-less crumbles or an Impossible Burger, because there is just that expectation of certain flavorings with a meat sauce that can't be replicated by only using vegetables. Good recipe for a mushroom pasta sauce though!
