I made vegetarian spaghetti bolognese
I never say no to a plate of bolognese. Traditionally made with tagliatelle, but I love it just as much with spaghetti. As long as it’s way too much pasta and always covered with mountains of cheese. Traditionally made with ground meat, but guess what? It’s also really delicious with cauliflower.
During my daily round of the internet, I came across a very unusual recipe: bolognese sauce made with cauliflower. My first reaction was yuck, be serious. Bolognese is supposed to contain ground meat. Ground meat is fatty, becomes wonderfully tender when you let it simmer for a long time, and above all contributes to the flavor. No way was I going to replace that with cauliflower.
Cauliflower
Still, I saved it and it kept popping into my head. The recipe did come from Bon Appetit, and the editors there are usually right. The photo also looked incredibly delicious. Besides, I think it’s important not to eat too much meat, so if you can make an equally delicious sauce with cauliflower, why the hell not? And so recently I put not ground meat, but a cauliflower and mushrooms in my shopping basket.
Rich sauce
You grind the mushrooms and cauliflower completely fine and cook them together with onions, garlic, rosemary and tomato paste, among other things, until they form a creamy sauce. I was still afraid I’d miss the fattiness of the ground meat, but Bon Appetit has come up with a solution for that too. After draining the pasta, you add it to the pan with the sauce, along with a generous knob of butter and lots of Parmesan. You let this simmer for a few more minutes, making the sauce incredibly rich.
My mother always added chicken livers to the bolognese, which gives the meat sauce more depth. The mushrooms in this recipe reminded me of that a little; their earthy flavor adds extra umami and also contributes to a meaty texture.
Conclusion
And now for the million-dollar question: is it just as delicious as a classic bolognese with meat? Nope. I’m certainly not going to tell you that you’ll never need to buy ground meat again and that cauliflower the way to go is. Still, I was very pleasantly surprised. The sauce is savory, rich and incredibly flavorful. Another nice benefit is that the chopped cauliflower only needs to cook for 6–8 minutes, whereas ground meat definitely needs an hour (but preferably much longer) to simmer. So you can easily throw this pasta together on a weekday, and I’ll definitely be making it again.
