Tuscan Red Wine Meat Sauce: Flavorful Pasta Compliment

Tuscan Meat Sauce combining beef, pork, tomatoes, red wine and mushrooms for a flavorful sauce to compliment your favorite pasta dishes.

Photo byThat Recipe

Cooking with wine adds a great depth of flavor. And when you cook it for an hour like this recipe, most of the alcohol does in fact burn off making it a family friendly sauce.

I left some of my homemade Italian Sausage out of the casings so I could make this and other recipes. If you have ground pork you can easily add the spices from that recipe and swap it into step 2. If you get sausage links, just squeeze the sausage from the casings to get bulk sausage.

What wine should I use for making pasta sauce?

For those unfamiliar with wines, you want to use a nice dry red like cabernet, piot noir, or chianti. White wines or sweeter red dessert wines will not work as well in this recipe.

Recipe

Ingredients

• 2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
• ½ large red onion (finely chopped)
• 2 carrots (finely chopped)
• 2 stalks celery (finely chopped)
• ½ ounce dried porcini mushrooms (reconstituted according to package directions and chopped)
• ½ pound bulk Italian sausage (sweet or spicy)
• 1 pound 80% lean ground beef
• ½ cup dry red wine
• 14.5 ounce can Italian plum tomatoes (undrained)
• salt and black pepper (to taste)
• Liquid from reconstituting porcini mushrooms

Instructions

• Heat olive oil in a large Dutch oven over medium-high heat. Add red onion, carrots, and celery and cook, stirring frequently, until the vegetables are tender and caramelized, about 8-10 minutes.
• Add the chopped porcini mushrooms and sausage and cook until sausage is no longer pink inside breaking the sausage into small pieces with a spoon as it cooks.
• Add the ground beef and cook until browned.
• Add the wine and scrape brown bits from the bottom of the pan with a wooden spoon. Simmer to reduce wine by about half.
• Stir in tomatoes and the liquid from reconstituting the mushrooms. Season with salt and black pepper, to taste.
• Reduce heat to medium low and simmer, stirring occasionally, for another 45 minutes. If sauce becomes too thick, add ¼ cup of water at a time.