Broccoli Bolognese Is an Anywhere, Anytime Pasta
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As much as we all talk about cooking with seasonal ingredients, sometimes you just want a recipe you can make whenever, wherever. Sometimes you just want broccoli bolognese.
Kinda ugly but extremely delicious, it’s a dish that requires little more than a head of grocery-store broccoli, a couple of sweet Italian sausages, and a box of pasta.
The magic lies in how it all comes together. You blanch then chop the broccoli, essentially getting the bits the same size as the crumbled sausage you’ve got browning in a large sauté pan.
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When you combine the two, you add a cup of salty, starchy pasta water to form the base of your sauce. But how do you get it to be all... bolognese-ish?
A potato masher.
That’s probably the one definitive takeaway you can glean from Molly Baz and me in the recipe’s video. As the broccoli and sausage simmer in the bubbling water, a masher incorporates the two ingredients, kind of making them one, a process that reaches its fruition with the addition of butter and a shower of finely grated parm.
As Molly skeptically points out in our video, it’s not really a bolognese in the traditional sense.
But I like to think that broccoli bolognese—or “broc bolo” in Molly speak—just sounds good. Almost as good as it tastes.
Get the recipe:
Broccoli Bolognese with Orecchiette
Originally Appeared on Bon Appétit
