Week Four: Bolognese Fail

So this week, there is no recipe because the dish I made is not something I would want anyone to ever repeat.

I attempted to use Mark Bittman's recipe for bolognese sauce and I made one seemingly small, but fatal mistake. The recipe called for 1/4 cup chopped pancetta or bacon.

Ok, strike what I said about one mistake. Really, there were two errors. When bacon and pancetta are the choices, one should ALWAYS choose pancetta. At least when you're making a sauce of Italian origin. But, being lazy and cheap, I went with bacon-- high quality, organic, slab bacon, but bacon none the less. So ingredient choice fail.

Second misstep: I did some pretty stupid math. In my mind, a quarter cup is four ounces, which is equivalent to a quarter pound, which is exactly how much I got from the butcher. Um, no. A quarter cut actually converts to two ounces. So I used the double bacon. (That's right. I used twice as much as I should have of an already sub-par ingredient.)

To be fair, we ate the sauce and it was edible. But it wasn't good. Not even close to good. How not good was reinforced when, last night, I tried a friend's bolognese dish at Mercato, a legit and delicious BYO Italian restaurant. Their sauce was meaty, savory, soft and delicious. Mine kind of tasted like armpits.

Lesson(s) learned. Next time a mere two ounces of pancetta might make all the difference.