My quick and easy penne Bolognese recipe will make you a cheats Bolognese – a speedy Bolognese for a mid-week meal if you don’t have a few hours to make a proper ragu alla Bolognese. While not as deeply flavoured as the real deal, my minced meat sauce recipe still makes a deliciously rich dish thanks to the addition of cream.
This speedy penne Bolognese recipe will make you a cheats Bolognese. While it’s not as rich, as deeply flavoured and as complex as an authentic, slow-cooked ragù alla Bolognese from Bologna in Emilia Romagna in Northern Italy, it still makes an incredibly delicious minced meat sauce with pasta that takes no time to make. It’s one for the time-poor!
One of our best pasta recipes, our ragu alla Bolognese recipe makes the real deal ragù alla Bolognese that’s used for both tagliatelle all Bolognese and lasagne alla Bolognese. Follow Terence’s exacting ingredient list and cooking directions and you’ll get a perfect ragù every single time that tastes just like it does in Bologna.
Trust me on this, I’ve eaten the real thing with Terence in Italy and have eaten his ragù at home for decades – and I was making it for my mum for months, as it’s her favourite dish in the world. However, it takes 3 hours, or rather 3 hours 15 minutes to be precise, and I got busy and no longer had time to make it.
Whereas my speedy penne Bolognese recipe for a cheats Bolognese takes just 45 minutes to prepare or an hour at most for an even richer sauce. And if you’re looking for something different, try my Middle Eastern-inspired spiced lamb ragu with pine nuts, fresh mint and dill. I’ll tell you more about it below and share a few tips to making this quick and easy ‘cheats Bol’.
For more quick and easy pastas, see our canned tuna pasta with scallions, capers and fresh herbs, asparagus, mushrooms and bacon gnocchi, this creamy tomato pasta sauce with gnocchi, my cherry tomato feta pasta recipe, this canned sardine pasta with gremolata and pangrattato, mac and cheese with crispy bacon and caramelised shallots, and bacon and mushroom pasta, and fusilli with a creamy pumpkin pasta sauce.
Penne Bolognese Recipe for a Quick and Easy Bolognese
You could jump straight to the tips to making this penne Bolognese, but I wanted to offer a quick explanation: we don’t usually share ‘cheats’ recipes here, skip steps and cut corners. We love nothing more than learning how to make local dishes properly in the places of their origin, and sharing those recipes with you.
When we launched Grantourismo way back in 2010 with our year-long grand tour of the world dedicated to slow, local and experiential travel that was one of our goals that year, to learn to cook the quintessential dishes of places we settled into, and to share those recipes here in a series called The Dish. And we’ve done that ever since.
But we all get busy – even those of us who write about food and travel for a living, who spend part of almost every day doing some kind of food research and recipe testing – and we get that not everyone has 3 hours to cook dinner, and I’ve become more aware of that than ever this year.
At home in Siem Reap, I only have Terence and Pepper, our Cambodian cat, to take care of – although it’s Terence who has long specialised in the more complicated dishes that take longer to make and has nourished me with countless comforting slow cooked meals.
When I returned to Australia earlier this year, for the first time since the pandemic, to take care of my 77 year-old mum, the first thing I wanted to do was make her all the wonderful food that she loved that she hadn’t eaten in years.
One of those dishes was Terence’s ragù alla Bolognese, which mum has long adored – but made with spaghetti not tagliatelle. It’s an Australian thing! And it was spaghetti ‘Bolognaise’ or ‘spag bol’ when we were kids growing up in the 1970s and 80s. Read Matt Preston’s history of the Italian-Australian dish.
Mum made the best ‘spag bol’, which was one of my favourite dishes as a child. But, sadly, mum no longer cooks and has no interest in cooking. She’s lived alone for many years, saw very few people during the pandemic, and when I arrived at her home I burst into tears, as she was so thin and so frail.
So just like when I’d visit my grandparents during my uni years, when my baboushka who would shake her head and tut-tut, telling me I was too skinny, and sit me down at the table for a feast of all my favourite Russian-Ukrainian dishes that she’d cooked for me, I did the same for my mother.
Then things got busy, crazy busy. Not only was I working on Grantourismo, as well as two cookbooks – a Russian-Ukrainian family cookbook cum memoir, as well as the Cambodian cookbook and culinary history that Terence and I have been working on for over a decade, I went and took on a guidebook update. I know…
All of that is to explain why you’ve been seeing ‘quick and easy’ and ‘speedy’ recipes here. Because I get that no matter how much we’d all love to spend hours in the kitchen making loved-ones delicious meals to comfort, nurture and sustain them, this is challenging at times, especially on weeknights.
So consider this speedy penne Bolognese recipe, which is utterly inauthentic, a recipe for a fast yet delicious and hearty minced meat pasta for mid-week meals, and save Terence’s divine ragù alla Bolognese for weekends when you have more time to linger in the kitchen with loved-ones.
Tips to Making this Penne Bolognese Recipe
Just a few quick tips for making this quick and easy penne Bolognese recipe, as it really is a cinch to make and comes together quickly. And while I do like to take an hour, I’ve made it in 45 minutes and it’s still delish.
One of the important steps in making a great ragù alla Bolognese that I’ve skipped is the soffritto, because not only is it time-consuming to finely dice the onion, garlic, carrot and celery that comprises a soffritto, it also takes a lot of time to cook.
I still recommend frying a diced onion slowly, but instead of garlic cloves I’ve used garlic powder, which might make an Italian groan. Do as you prefer but don’t use that jarred minced garlic, which is just awful.
One corner I haven’t cut is browning the minced meat – and I still use a combination of ground beef and ground pork, with a good fatty content; you don’t want lean meat – which makes the most delicious meaty sauce. Browning the ground meat is a must and is the longest stage, but it’s worth it.
My penne Bolognese recipe calls for a 400g can of diced tomatoes. An authentic ragù alla Bolognese only has a little tomato paste and doesn’t have tomato sauce or tomato ketchup. That’s a Neapolitan ragù which tomato-driven, made with loads of passata. This dish isn’t that either, as the Naples style pasta sauce is cooked with steak and ribs that are served separately as a main course.
Try to use peeled San Marzano tomatoes if you can source them (and afford them), as the elongated plum tomatoes are full of so much flavour and natural sweetness. I also add a little ground paprika, which gives the penne Bolognese some sweetness and warmth.
With ragù alla Bolognese there’s long been a debate as to whether a genuine Bolognese contains milk or cream. My penne Bolognese recipe is completely authentic and calls for cream, which gives the pasta an incredible richness. You can use less cream if you like, or use a little milk instead.
I recommend using dried penne for this penne Bolognese, as the tubes capture the sauce so well. Penne rigate (ridged pasta) or this large rigatoni, which I use for this spicy Italian sausage pasta recipe, are also great as the sauce clings even more to the grooves in the pasta.
Always use a large slotted spoon to transfer the pasta from the pot to the pan to combine the sauce with the pasta before serving, and take a little cooking water with the pasta, as the starch helps thicken the sauce and helps it cling to the pasta.
Lastly, add some grated Parmesan to the sauce – we prefer to use a little Parmigiano Reggiano or Pecorino Romano cheese, even though they’re more expensive, as less is more – and grind on some cracked black pepper to the penne Bolognese.
Stir to combine well, taste, adjust the seasoning to suit your palate, and serve immediately, as the pasta will continue to cook. If you don’t want to serve it straight away, then cook your penne so it’s a little harder than al dente.
Distribute the penne Bolognese between four plates – or two plates, and you’ll have enough leftovers for another meal – drizzle on a good quality extra virgin olive oil, shower the dish with more Parmesan, grind on a little cracked black pepper and serve with a simple green salad and crusty bread to mop up the sauce.
Penne Bolognese Recipe for a Speedy Bolognese
Ingredients
- 2 tbsp olive oil
- 1 onion - diced
- 250 g ground pork
- 250 g ground beef
- 1 tsp salt - or to taste
- ½ tsp garlic powder - or to taste
- 400 g tinned tomatoes - diced
- 1 tbsp tomato sauce - or tomato paste
- 1 tsp ground paprika - or to taste
- 500 g penne
- 100 ml thickened cream
- 2 tbsp grated parmesan cheese
- ½ tsp cracked black pepper - or to taste
Instructions
- Put a large pot of salted water on the stove to boil.
- Heat the olive oil in a deep frying pan over medium-high heat until shimmering then add the diced onion and fry for a few minutes until soft.
- Add the ground pork and ground beef, break the minced meat up into fine pieces, and continue to fry, stirring occasionally, until the mince starts to brown.
- Add the salt, garlic powder, diced tomatoes, tomato sauce or paste, and ground paprika, stir to combine well, and increase the heat to high. Continue to cook until the sauce bubbles and reduces to a dense consistency then reduce the heat to low.
- Add the penne to the salted boiling water, give it a stir, put the lid on, and cook, following the packet instructions, until al dente.
- Pour the thickened cream into the pasta sauce, stir well to incorporate, increase the heat to medium, and stir occasionally.
- When the penne is al dente, use a large slotted spoon to transfer the pasta from the pot to the pan, taking a little cooking water with the pasta, add the grated parmesan and cracked black pepper, stir to combine well, taste, and adjust the seasoning to suit your palate.
- Divide the pasta between four plates – or two plates, and you’ll have enough leftovers for another meal – drizzle on a little extra virgin olive oil, sprinkle on more parmesan, grind on a little cracked black pepper if you like, and serve immediately, with a side salad and crusty bread.
Nutrition
Please do let us know if you make my penne Bolognese recipe in the comments below as we’d love to hear how the recipe turns out for you.
