Slow Cooker Beef Ragu – Recipe

Take your basic soffritto, add a nice cut of beef, and decent glug of red wine and we’re off to the races. Soffritto works as a sauce base for so many Italian recipes. It has many variations like a slightly chunkier variant called Mirepoix in France or The Holy Trinity in Cajun cooking which swaps the carrots for peppers.

If you’re patient then this is an incredibly tasty meal that you can pop into the slow cooker for hours and hours. The only tomato based component is tomato puree. Traditionally Ragu is a meat based sauce not a tomato based sauce. This recipe serves 6 people well.

Ingredients

• 1 Medium White Onion
• 1 Celery stick
• 1 Large Carrot
• 1x 187ml bottle good red wine.
• 75g (approximately half a tube) Tomato Purée
• 500g Fresh Tagliatelle. (i.e not dried.)
• 1x 800-1100g Briskett (You can usually get these in the roasting joints section)
• 1 Litre Good Beef Stock
• Get a decent sized wedge of Parmesan

Method

1. Start by finely dicing the onion, celery and carrot. You should be looking at cubes no bigger than a few millimetres in size.
2. If you’ve purchased a piece of beef that has been strung together, un-tie it all. then season with salt and pepper.
3. Hear a large pan with oil or butter. Not too much but an amount good enough to cover the base of the pan. Brown the meat on as many sides as is feasible.
4. Add the now browned meat, onions, garlic and celery to the slow cooker along with the wine, tomato purée and enough beef stock to cover all the ingredients.
5. Cook on low for about 7 hours or high for about 3.5 hours.
6. After the allotted time, extract the meat from the slow cooker and put it on a chopping board.
7. With a pair of forks, shred the beef then add the now shredded beef back into the slow cooker.

8. Stir the beef in then add the fresh Tagliatelle . Cover with a bit of the stock if there’s not quite enough liquid. Don’t go mad with it though!
9. After half an hour season with more salt and pepper, then stir the pan completely and mix it all together.
10. Serve in bowls and grate over a load of Parmesan.