With an incredible Sausage Ragu, you'll take your meat sauce to the next level by using sausages. My favourite way to prepare this sausage pasta sauce is long and slow — just as we would do Shredded Beef Ragu. Finish off with Garlic Bread and a garden salad with Italian Dressing.
Sausage Ragu Sauce
Every butcher works really hard to put flavour and juiciness in sausages. Plus, I almost consider it my super responsibility to prove to you how much magic you can pull out of sausages beyond simple barbie* purposes or the usual Bangers and Mash!
Enter – Sausage Ragu. Starting with the classic soffritto helps, which might sound fancy but what you are really doing is sautéing onions, garlic, celery and carrots over low heat to make them beautifully sweet. It's a secret tip to make your dish flavour base amazing.
* Just don't take this as an insult to sausage sandwiches, please. I am a regular at the weekend Bunning's sausage sizzle fundraising. 🙂
Ingredients in Sausage Ragu
And what you'll need for this Sausage Ragu. No fancy ingredients!
THE SAUSAGES
2 x Beef + pork – I like a mixture of beef and pork sausages for the perfect soft texture combined with flavour. The beef sausages give the flavour and the pork the tenderness.
You can either use just beef or pork. With only beef, your sauce will not have the squishy meat in it that you would want. If using only pork the meat flavour is less stark. However, to be clear, if I only had one of these sausages, I would not hesitate to make this recipe! :)
Longevity
Whichever you choose, choose good sausages with more meat and less filler. Or check out the ingredients list (ideally the first 85%+ meat) or have a look at the sausage – fat specks there indicate good meat, a uniform pink colour means lots of fillers such as the sausage sold at "BBQ sausage sizzles" ("BBQ sausages"). So they can get as low as 55% meat (the rest is flour, maize, and non meat products) and usually a mix of beef and chicken.
But generally speaking, it is your friendly (local) butcher who is probably the best source. He can tell you what's really going on in his sausages and he can tell you precisely! 🙂
Casings of sausages
Not inside the casings of sausages. It is common in the US that sausage meat comes in mince or ground beef form, not in the casings you might see. Lucky you! For the rest of us, just squeeze the meat out. It is not hard.
OTHER INGREDIENTS
Here are the other ingredients for the ragu sauce:
For the soffrito, these things - onion, garlic, carrot, celery - are cooked slowly over low, so that they soften and sweeten and then give the flavour base for the sauce. This is a classic cooking technique employed all over the world in Italian, Mediterranean, Cajun, or South American cuisines.
Secret ingredient!
Fennel seeds! It's sautéed in the soffrito and helps with that little je ne sais quoi in the sauce. It's in there only if you have the kind of palette that's very, very refined.
This is the method of using a liquid to dissolve bits stuck on the base of a cooking vessel (sausage meat) into a sauce, and wine – red wine adds flavour to the sauce, and we use it to deglaze the pot. It's free flavour and it's called 'fond' those "gold bits". This is a standard cooking technique I use all the time for sauces and stews.
Substitute with 0% alcohol wine or more chicken stock.
- Chicken stock, low sodium – This with canned tomato makes up the bulk of the liquid for the sauce. I use chicken rather than beef stock because it's a milder flavour so you can taste the meat flavour better. I always used low sodium stock so I don't have to worry about sauces being too salty.
- Tomato paste – Just a smidge to boost the tomato flavour and help thicken the sauce.
- Thyme and bay leaves – The herbs for this pasta sauce. Fresh is best but dried is fine too.
- Chilli flakes (red pepper flakes) – Optional, for a touch of warmth.
PAPPARDELLE PASTA
I like to serve this sausage ragu with pappardelle pasta, the wide thick pasta that is sold coiled up, like pictured. The surface is slightly rough so it's ideal for tossing with thick hearty sauces like this sausage ragu, shredded beef ragu and chicken ragu which clings to the pasta well.
Having said that though, I'd happily serve sausage ragu with any pasta – short or long!
How to make Sausage Ragu
As you would for your favourite Bolognese, just take a little extra time for slow cooking!
Step 1
Cook the onion, celery and carrot then the garlic in a large heavy based pot over medium heat for around 8 minutes, or until the carrot is soft and sweet. Never allow the vegetables to go golden. But this is key because if you want a really beautiful flavour base for your sauce, don't rush it.
Step 2
Remove sausage meat from casings, and by squeezing it out – literally, from the casings, you just squeeze it out – and cook like mince. On this step, break it up as you go, but don't get caught up in it, sausage meat is 'stickier' so it won't crumble as well. Later partway through cooking we'll break it up finer.
Step 3
Next cook the tomato sauce for 1 minute to remove the raw sour flavour from the tomato paste. Next reduce the wine down by half before cooking out the winey flavour which only takes a couple of minutes. And finally, add the remaining ingredients: I always do canned tomato, chicken stock, bay leaves, thyme, salt, pepper and chilli flakes.
Step 4
Pop the lid on and put it in the oven at 180°C/350°F (160°C) for 1 hour (slow cook #1). The funny thing about that is I feel like this sounds so high for somebody cooking this slow for the oven but in reality this is the equivalent oven temperature of a very small stove burner on low.
Why oven instead of stove? It's just easier because it's purely hands off – you can just put it in the oven and forget about it. No need to worry about the base catching. This sauce is quite thick so, if you decided to use the stove instead, you will need to constantly be stirring it.
Step 5
Remove pot from oven and use a potato masher to crush meat into better pieces. (Sausage meat does not fall apart as well as minced ground beef – see step 2 notes). At this point the meat is tender so it doesn't require much effort. Unless I do this mostly around the pot, I usually do 8 to 10 mashing motions around the pot.
Step 6
Slow cook #2 (45 minutes) – Then return the pot into the oven for a further 45 minutes to finish slow cooking. Once done, the sauce It should be very thick like the above, very flavourful. That's what we want, because a) the thickness loosens up when you get it tossed with pasta, and b) the sauce gets dispersed through the pasta and diluted so the flavour is diffused. On that note, the sauces flavour should be strong in the pot because it should be strong enough to make the sauce awesome when its been tossed in to the pasta!
NOTHING IN LIFE IS FREE – ESPECIALLY TOSSING PASTA WITH SAUCE!
Step 1
Canned seafood – Open cans of bellisima and olives and drain. Scoop out a big jug of the pasta cooking water just before draining–we're going to use this in the next step. Wrapping the starch in the water around the pasta is what helps the sauce cling to the pasta.
Step 2
Save this for when you make a full batch of pasta – If you are using this for full batch pasta then go ahead and put the pasta into the ragu pot set over medium heat on the stove. If you are like me and making a smaller batch (making enough for 2 servings) return the drained pasta back into the same pot you used to cook pasta.
Step 3
Pasta sauce – Mix your pasta sauce into pasta (as obvious if you put the pasta in pasta sauce pot).
Step 4
Add 1/2 cup of the pasta cooking water. Squirt it on the thick pasta sauce, it loosens it up enough so it coats the pasta strands. But it has starch in the pasta cooking water from the pasta itself. The fat in the pasta sauce reacts with this starch and turns it into a thicker sauce so it sticks to the pasta strands rather than sitting pooled at the bottom of your pasta bowl.
Step 5
Toss, toss, toss! In the event that step failed, then use two spatulas and toss the pasta for about a minute, or until the pasta strands are stained red and the pasta sauce gets tangled throughout and clinging right on the pasta. If it is too hard to loosen things up, use an extra slosh of pasta cooking water to reach the bottom of the sauce and incorporate it.
Step 6
Pasta – Warm bowl – Divide the pasta between bowls. If you want to keep the pasta slippery and warm longer, I like to warm the pasta bowls beforehand (just 30 seconds in the microwave!). Cold pasta = dry pasta!
