My experience and struggle cooking a good Italian style bolognese + new recipe:

On the 23rd of December 2024 i posted, 'louie milebergs famous bolognaise recipe'. At the time of writing this up, i believed i had fine-tuned the classic ragu well enough to post this perfect recipe. However, as of now (16th of February 2025) i disagree with what i wrote in the original, and am here to amend it with reasoning.

Big Disclaimer: Not to get too bulked down on what makes a good 'traditional' bolognese, as i believe recipes should only be used as a guide and should be adjusted to however you may want. Theres a huge discussion on whether to include garlic in a bolognese, and during my recent bolognese epiphany of the last week, i was chatting to a mate from Naples and they said do not put garlic in for traditional sake. So here ive chosen not to. However this recipe is a mere guide and how i would chose to go about it, if you like garlic put some in or anything you want itll still be delicious. But here my goal was deliciousness and traditional, so i will follow that in the recipe.

Sofrito: – 1 Large onion – 4 ribs of celery – 2 carrots – With a fine dice on all

Ragu: – Ground beef (90/10 or 80/20) – Tomato Paste – Beef stock cube – Dry red wine – Fresh herbs of your choice (Bayleaf, thyme, basil) – Water

Step 1: Heat up an oven-proof safe pot on a medium heat (4/5) with a splash of olive oil. No need for excessive amounts

Step 2: Once you believe the oil is heated, you will test it. Add a small amount of your sofrito into the pan and listen out, you want to hear an immediate sizzle when the veg hits the oil. If not, let it heat up for a few more minutes. If an immediate sizzle, add in the rest.

Step 3: Cook on a low heat for around 25 minutes, it should almost blend all together and be soft and nearly dissolve into 1. There should be no visible chunks of any veg if the dice was fine enough. I like to mash the veg around with a wooden spoon just to crush it up even finer.

Step 4: When the veg is soft and a mass of 1, push to the side and add in our beef. We should still have a bit of oil on the bottom of our pan. Break the ground beef up into small chunks and push it down into the oil making good contact with the oil and base of the pan. I like to do mine in small batches. Here we will leave these to brown. Constantly check for browning on the bottom of the searing beef to make sure its browning or not burning.

Step 5: After maybe 4/5 ish minutes we flip the beef and repeat on the other side but just aim to cook out the raw colour. Once finished, push beef into the pile of veg and make it fuse into 1. Then add in the rest of the ground beef (if chose to be done in batches) and then once rawness cooked out just fuse into the pile of beefy veg.

Step 6: Add in the tomato paste just maybe a table spoon and a bit. Leave it to fry in the bottom of the pan for a maybe a minute just to cook out the rawness. Then use wooden spoon to mix into the veg and beef.

Step 7: Adding in the wine. I first initally push the beef pile onto one side, turn the heat up and pour in a small amount of wine almost creating a small well of wine thatll quickly evapourate. I believe both cooking with your nose and heat control is important here. Turn the heat up after the wine goes in and it should immediately start to boil, you should get hit with a strong alcohol up your nose that makes you take a step back. Once this first bit of wine has cooked out, add in more and push the veg/beef into it. Lower heat back to medium, add in more wine – I ended up using about just over 1/3 of the bottle and just let it cook out for around 5 minutes.

Step 8: Add in beef stock cube and then fill up with water. This will be cooking low and slow for hours in the oven (or stove i just chose oven) so too much liquid doesnt matter. We have a lot of time to reduce.

Step 9: Bring up to a simmer, and place into a preheated oven of around 120 degrees c with a lid slightly cracked. Cook for an hour, hour and a half maybe and there would be slight reduction. Cooking time really varies, i today had mine cooking for about 3 and a half hours in total. Your time can be completely adjusted to fit your needs. It is just important to cook uncovered to allow brownness to develop on the side of the dish. This can be scraped with a wooden spoon into the sauce – check on this regularly.

Step 10: Serve with pasta and enjoy

What led me to believe the original recipe needed adjusting: During my week-long bolognese ephinany, id be reading about how a blend of pork and beef should really be used for a bolognese. I had remembered seeing a packet sold in lidl which contained 250g of ground beef and 250g of ground pork – so i thought would be perfect. However, the only item i could find was a 500g blend of both pork and ground beef and thought id take a punt and try it. I believe this bolognese was genuinely unenjoyable and almost horrible.

I had 2 problems with it – The meat flavour was horrible – It was overly sweet

This cheap lidl pork beef blend allowed me to realise the importance of high quality beef in a bolognese, as at its forefront it is a meat sauce. The cheap pork flavour with the overly sweetness was really really bad and i couldnt end up finishing it. (Read on for overly sweetness)

Changes from the original:

From 1 to 2 carrots in the sofrito and the importance of a fine dice:

This is our first change from the original recipe. I initially stated to use 1 carrot as theyre quite sweet, and did state a fine-dice was needed. However ive realised 2 carrots is more appropriate and i cannot emphaise enough the importance of a fine dice. When i used to make it, i didnt dice the carrot up enough – and whilst the onion and celery would blend and dissolve into the meat sauce – the carrot would always remain structured and almost leave chunks throughout. Biting down on these chunks would add unneccessary sweetness and sometimes made the dish far too sweet and really not great. Ive since learnt the importance of a FINE dice, we need these carrots small so they are able to blend into the sauce. Because of the removal of chunks, ive found using more carrots (1 to 2) is important as the sweetness is more subtle and not a complete burst of overpowering sweet flavour.

Removal of the draining of fat colinder method:

Cant be bothered to do this , dont believe theres any need just scape fat off using spoon after cooking if really can be bothered but doesnt make a difference – unless using unbelievably fatty beef then no need i dont think.

Removal of tinned tomatoes:

The biggest change in this recipe is the removal of the tins of tomatoes. Any bolognese ive ever really made at its core was a tomato meat sauce. However, traditionally a bolognese is a meat sauce at its front, and i think is actually better without an overpowering tomato flavour. Whilst there are hints (the added tomato paste), it is more used to add body to the sauce and less tomato flavour itself. I think removing the tinned tomatos allow the flavours of the sofrito to shine and create a much richer and more enjoyable meat sauce compared to the tomato-based one we might commonly know.

More wine and added beef stock:

Quite obvious, due to lack of any tomato flavour we add more wine adding more richness and flavour to the meat sauce. I believe viewing the way to cook a bolognese almost as if its a red-wine braised stew allows for a more delicious flavour and overall better experience. Furthermore, using beef stock just creates an meatier flavour with more body and thus makes more sense than just plain water.

My first experience cooking the new bolognese, important notes and friends reviews:

Tonight i attempted to make my new developed recipe and it was overall a success. The ragu was deliciouslly rich and a very enjoyable meal.

However, there are some important disclaimers i must make:

When i made this today, i only used 1 carrot in my sofrito due to my past experiences of over-sweetness. Here in the recipe ive doubled it to 2. I found that the ragu would have benefited with a more round flavour of sweetness and i ended up adding sugar to fight off the dry-ness of the red wine.

Furthermore, i found the ragu to be slightly overseasoned. I would always salt at every stage when making my initial ragu and didnt think to do anything different today. However, due to the new addition of beef stock – that contians a high amount of sodium which led to the sauce being too salty. I was able to combat this by not salting my pasta water, and adding some acid (lemon juice) to take the salty edge off. I also believe the addition of an extra carrot like in the point above would have been able to fight some of the salt.

I cooked this ragu for the first time hosting dinner for 2 of my mates and was met with raving reviews:

One guest stated: 'Wow this is amazing', 'I've had worse in restaurants'

Another guest stated: 'This isnt too salty' – but they have a serious sodium palette problem

Overall i believe this was a success and i will be cooking my bolognese like this onwards.

Alice In Chains – Dirt: A review

having first stumbling accross alice in chains through spotify in 2019, i was immediately drawn to their album 'Dirt' (1992) due to the fact it was the album containing their most popular song 'them bones'. i gave them bones a listen and realised it was brilliant. I then queued the rest of the album and listened to it on repeat for a very long time. This is an album ive always known very well and had a strong appreciation for.

However, it wasnt until recently (last few months) that i rediscovered this album after it being a long time without listening, and properly started to appreicate it for what it is. This album comes out of the so called 'grunge' period, an era in the early to mid 90's where a hard-rock scene appeared out of seattle washington, creating what are really known as the 'Big 4': Nirvana, Pearl-Jam, Soundgarden and Alice In Chains. Nirvana of course went to become a large commercial success, and i believe to an extent pearl-jam too. However soundgarden (outside of the success of Black-Hole Sun) and especially alice in chains always flew under the radar commerically and were often seen only within the grunge scene and comparitavely never did as well commerically.

Alice in chains in my eyes were always the darkest of the 4, which i think dirt perfectly captures. Their first album facelift released two years prior, is their least dark album and takes a more almost fun spin on the theme of drugs, saying really how they use and enjoy them. Dirt i think is more of a turning point, where the music and lyrics perfectlly capture the moment of realisation where the drugs were becoming a problem. They were no longer a fun thing to take, singer Layne Staley knew he was dependent and had become an addict. Alice in chains went to release their third and final album 3 years later, which feels nothing but hopeless and horrid. Laynes life had been taken over and the music reflects this. 7 years later Layne died of a drug overdose.

Even without knowing this context, dirt is an incredible album. From an instrumental perspective the riffs and music are just unbelievable. Jerry cantrell was albe to write such catchy guitar riffs that create a brilliant atmosphere. However i believe the riffs are able really shine when put alongside the lyrics. For example, the song Sickman constantly changes tempo and does not keep a musical idea for a long time. I believe this is reflected in Laynes lyrics, initally saying how he'll want to become clean from drugs before he dies ('I wont rest until my head is clear'). However this is immediately switched up lyrically and instrumentally with later saying ('what's the difference ill die, in this sick world of mine'). This constant changing creates such a dark atmosphere for the song which is promeninent throughout the entire album.

The whole theme of drug addiction throughout is not one i can relate to, but i dont believe it stops the album from resonating so strongly with me at all. I just think every song is an absoutle banger and just knowing the wider context surrounding it helps me appreicate it more. This is in my opinion the best album to come out of the 'grunge' era, as it is genuienly flawless. And is in my top 5 albums OAT. Definitely worth listening to

A Brief Review

Poppy War was recommended to me by a friend to help me take my mind off other things and there is no understating what a game-changing recommendation this was.

All I knew going in was that it was about a war and may have something about poppies. From the very first chapter, I was hooked. Without spoiling anything it was very clear from the start that I was going to enjoy this book as I love a classic underdog defying the odds and becoming great arc. This book managed to engage me more than I thought possible and compelled me to read whenever I could, before bed, when I wake up, on the train, in a lecture, the 10 minutes before a meeting any time I could I would be reading this book. The focus on military strategy and the mystery around “shamanism” were uniquely engaging and enjoyable. This book is a must-read and I'm buzzing to read the next one in the trilogy!

louie milebergs famous bolognaise recipe:

mirepoix: – 1 white or red onion doesnt matter – couple sticks of celery – 1 carrot dont go for too much carrot theyre quite sweet

ragu: -ground beef ideally use something like 80/20 -2 tins of tomatos want good quality tomatos -tomato paste -fresh basil if youve got it doesnt matter if not use dried basil -dry red wine

step 1: heat up a cast iron pot to a high ish heat and add good quality olive oil. if using a fattier beef for eg 80/20 dont add much oil. but if using something leaner like 95/5 add more oil.

step 2: add in beef once oil is screaming hot and get a good sear. leave for a good 5 ish minutes on 1 side to get browning and add salt at this point and then start to break up once got good brown bits all round pot

step 3: once beef browned on all sides put into a strainer with bowl underneath and drain off the excess fat. then add more olive oil and add the mirepoix we need a serious fine dice we do not want chunks maybe even grate the mirepoix instead of chopping to get it really fine

step 4 add more olive oil in and then we need to sweat the vegetables until really soft over medium heat we need them to almost dissolve to nothing also add salt to draw out the moisture id say about 15/20 mins of sweating. preheat oven to like 120 degrees c at this point

step 5 add in your tomato paste at this point doesnt matter how much really just make sure to 'cook it out' (add it into the pan on its own, do not let it touch the vegetables. id say about 2 minutes of frying it around on its own and you should smell it) tomato paste is typically quite tinny i think and if you cook it out you should smell the tinniness. once cooked out mix it in with the vegetables and everything should get sort of thicker.

step 6 add beef back in at this point and mix all together for a few mins. should start to brown on the bottom and then add in the wine to deglaze. turn heat to medium high at this point and then let the wine simmer out. you should be smelling constantly you can smell the alcohol leaving and scrape up and brown bits off the bottom theyre serious flavour. id say let it evapourate out for about 7 minutes but really just go until you cannot smell the alcohol anymore use as much wine as you want

step 7 add in the chopped tomatos and then rinse the cans out with water. ragu should be super watery at this point so bring to a simmer and then cover with a lid. add basil in at this point. place into an oven and cook for however long i normally do like 1 hour with lid on and then 45 minutes lid cracked and then like 20 minutes uncovered and then eat. if dont have oven proof dish you can do on stovetop leave it at a simmer for HOURS and stir every so often so the bottom doesnt burn

step 8 serve with your choice of pasta and enjoy

Since the study of science (or natural philosophy) was decoupled from the study of theology, it has grown increasingly distant too from the arts, and from artistic ways of thinking. The cold rationality of science and its desire for cohesion and simplicity, causality and objectivity put it ever at odds with those more subjective aspects of life. Never was this conflict felt so strongly as during the late 18th and early 19th century by the Romantics; and of the Romantics, by none so strongly as William Blake. Of Blake's many monotypes, perhaps the one most blatantly critical of the sciences is his Newton.

The publication, in 1687, of Newton’s Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, or Principia, was the culminating act of the scientific revolution of the previous two centuries, and many consider it the seminal work in the intellectual history of modern scientific thought. It described nature, for the first time, through a series of simple mathematical axioms linked, to the joy of the rationalist, irreconcilably by logic. And to the joy also of the empiricist, Newton’s laws of mechanics agreed almost universally with observations of the heavenly bodies. At the heart of the work was a dogmatic realism: the notion of an objective (and mathematical) reality, entirely independent of perception, a notion which would remain essentially untouched until the early 20th century. The goal of natural philosophy in the ensuing era of Enlightenment, led by the example set in Principia, became to uncover this mathematical reality, to describe the mathematical laws which underpin all natural processes. It is important here to stress the use of the word ‘uncover’. It was, and still is though to a lesser extent, the prevailing belief that natural philosophy was discovering something innately true about the universe, not that it was imposing mathematical structure on a Nature which was governed by some other unknown system of laws.

William Blake (1757-1827) belonged to the movement of Romantic poets and visual artists. He had, even by Romantic standards, a strenuous relationship with the Enlightenment philosophy which marked the second of the two major intellectual schools of his time. He was critical of religion in the same way Enlightenment thinkers were, although here again he took things a bit further than his fellows, inventing his own cosmology of satirical religious figures, telling their stories in volumes of biblical parody. In almost every other respect though, his opinions differed from those of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment ideals of objectivity, rationality and empiricism were in harsh conflict with the more emotional and intuitive beliefs of romanticism. The Cartesian division of the soul and the external world (res cogitans, res extensa) compounded in Newton’s Principia cut harshly into the film of passion and reverence through which the Romantics viewed the world. The apparently objective nature of reality, and the reduction of the conscious experience to purely physical processes was at clear odds with Romantic ideals of beauty as more than form. Newton, then, was to Blake’s mind an icon of Enlightenment thinking, a vital figure in its intellectual history. His simple mechanical laws were the crowning achievement of a movement which attempted to simplify the human experience to little more than mathematical formalism. There was no beauty to be found in the symmetries and resonances that characterised the external universe, nor in the pursuit of such things.

Blake’s Newton is depicted as a classical nude, contorted in the style of Michelangelo and bearing no similarity to the real man. He would appear then to be a divine figure, one of the characters in Blake’s personal religion. Where in the latter Blake aims to satirise the close-mindedness of religion, here he takes aim at the close-mindedness of science. A scroll, or perhaps a roll of fabric, appears to hang down from his head. This is objective reality unfurling at his feet beneath his critical gaze, upon which he makes clear geometric marks with a compass. That the fabric of reality extends from his head might represent the chain of scientific logic which ascribes objectivity not only to the external world, but to the conscious experience. Conversely, it could mean to imply, cynically, that no such division between the soul and reality as that of Descartes’ can be made. Absorbed in his science, Newton is oblivious to the animal and plant life that clings to the rock behind him; life which seems caught in an invisible current by which the scroll itself is unaffected. This is the subjective reality of Blake and the Romantics. The sparse, hostile appearance of this life is perhaps a call to find beauty through a reverence of nature for natures sake, abandoning the notion of beauty as an affair of form. More likely, it is meant to represent the disappearance of the natural world as a result of the industrialisation which marked the late 18th and early 19th centuries through which Blake lived. A disappearance which is going entirely unnoticed by Newton.

Rejected as a bit of a nutter in his lifetime, I like to think that Blake would find some solace in seeing how far departed physics is these days from the laws of Newton. In light of quantum theory, it is no longer possible to make any clear distinction between objective reality and our own perception, the very words we use to describe either have lost their meaning in modern science. It certainly can’t be said that the results of physical processes are all independent of observation. The neat, external mathematical reality revered by enlightenment thinkers would also appear, increasingly, to be false. The uncertainty inherent in quantum mechanics suggests an unavoidable incoherence in the structure of the universe, and it is clear that even our most successful physical models are approximations of something bigger. It would appear there is something strange going on in nature which our current mathematics is unable to grasp. Unfortunately, any comfort he took from this would of course be outweighed by his horror at how far the natural world he held so dear has been degraded, he was definitely right about that as well in hindsight.

If one had to choose a single painting which best represents the effect the sciences had on the popular psyche in the latter half of the 19th century, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to pick William Dyce’s Pegwell Bay, Kent – a Recollection of October 5th 1858. The painting depicts a family exploring the rock pools left by the receding tide, a backdrop of chalk cliffs beneath a vast sky, tinted slightly by the ochres of a setting sun. This otherwise ordinary scene gains a much greater significance when considered in the context of the scientific advancements of the time. Less than a year earlier Charles Darwin had published his foundational work On the Origin of Species, while at the same time geologists such as Charles Lyell were putting forward groundbreaking theories on geological formation. At the heart of both of these emerging fields was the suggestion that the Earth was almost incomprehensibly old. How must it have felt to be a human, previously stood amongst the shallow ripples of ordinary life, to be cast adrift on the vast tides of geological time? How could one hope to reconcile the implications of evolution with their religious beliefs? And what of the promises of eternity on which they had staked their life? An eternity which had at once adopted an earthly element. With this in mind it is hard not to imagine one sees fossils emerging from the carefully rendered strata of those white chalk cliffs, artifacts of a lost time, or to perceive a loss in the receding waves. The loss of what it is hard to say. An innocence perhaps. A comforting simplicity of thought. A lie. But such is the nature of change that even an exciting unknown is often rejected in preference for a familiar ignorance.

A minor feature in the painting is the father figure who stands with his back to his family, looking up to the sky. A faint white streak is Donati’s comet, which was visible in the southern sky at the date of the painting. Here is a reminder not only of the vast aeons of time, but of the perhaps yet more incomprehensible scale of our universe, which by the mid 19th century was beginning to be better understood. The viewers eye is ultimately drawn to this lone figure, who stands conscious for the first time of his position in the present moment as a mere flicker in the flame of antiquity, gazing up (down) into the unfathomable depths of the cosmos. Stood looking out over the waves, an educated member of Victorian society, one can imagine there runs through his mind the words of Lord Tennyson, writing almost a decade earlier:

If e'er when faith had fallen asleep, I hear a voice 'believe no more' And heard an ever-breaking shore That tumbled in the Godless deep, (In Memoriam A.H.H., 1850)

Whether this figure was ever able, as Tennyson was, to reconcile his faith with the new science of his age we cannot be sure. What is certain is that Dyce’s painting is a masterpiece of social commentary, finely perceptive to the hairline fractures which were beginning to form in the foundations of genteel society, a quiet yet disquieting image of a new and inevitable moment of being.

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