Getting to the meat of good, hearty Bolognese sauce

Bolognese is the sauce of the moment, gracing the menus of humble and haute restaurants all around town. Deeply flavored and meaty, it might be called the steak lover's dream of pasta. Although the words alla Bolognese have come to mean any Italian-style meat and tomato sauce, all Bolognese sauces are not the same.

While some of the best tomato sauces, such as puttanesca and marinara, require just a few minutes on the stove, adding beef , especially tasty tougher cuts, requires a longer cooking time. Most regions in Italy have their own particular version of a long-cooked meat sauce, called a sugo or ragu. Alla Bolognese just means it's from Bologna, in the Emilia Romagna region of northern Italy. There the ragu usually begins with soffritto, sauteed onion, celery, carrot, and sometimes garlic. Wine is added to deglaze the pan, then hot milk. Ground meat and pancetta, and sometimes dried porcini and chopped mortadella, are thrown in, and the sauce is left to simmer for at least two hours. This thick, sometimes quite austere sauce is traditionally served over tagliatelle or used as a stuffing for lasagna.

But there is another way to make a lustier ragu. In other parts of Italy, ragu is made by simmering meat on the bone. Sometimes either ground pork or chicken livers, or both, are added.

Recently I began a quest for a deeply flavorful Bolognese that could warm a winter night. I tried a few versions of the alla Bolognese sauces at Boston area restaurants, but found them to be dry, stringy, or bland. So I turned to the books of some masters -- Lidia Bastianich, chef, author, and television personality; Paul Bertolli, the former executive chef at Oliveto Restaurant in Berkeley, Calif., and now owner of Fra'Mani Handcrafted Salumi; and Heston Blumenthal, Michelin three-star chef of the Fat Duck in Bray, Berkshire, England. All have interesting ideas about long-cooked meat sauces, including the traditional Bolognese. I tried their recipes, spending long hours chopping, browning, and simmering.

In "Lidia's Family Table," Bastianich offers two different ragus alla Bolognese. Her version of an old recipe adds milk while the sauce simmers. The other is made without milk, and according to Bastianich, is the version more commonly seen in Bologna today. Both were good, but required a rich broth, and even then were not quite flavorful enough for my taste.

In his new book, "In Search of Perfection: Reinventing Kitchen Classics," Blumenthal plays around with Bolognese sauce, or "spag bol" as the British call it. He makes a sauce base with oxtail and pork shoulder, and then a tomato compote with vine-ripened tomatoes, star anise, Thai fish sauce, ketchup, and many other ingredients. The sauce base cooks for six hours, the compote for two hours, and then the two cook together for another two hours. He finishes the Bolognese sauce with butter and tarragon, and serves it over basic dried pasta, as an ironic nod to more everyday versions of the dish. In "Cooking by Hand," Bertolli makes a Bolognese sauce containing ground beef and pancetta. The sauce cooks for about three hours, but requires first making a meat broth with difficult-to-find oxtails, beef neck bones, boneless shin meat, chicken carcasses including necks and feet, and pork trotters. The broth is simmered for more than four hours. A tomato paste, which he calls a conversa, slowly cooked in the oven for six hours is also part of the recipe.

To my palate, the milk, wine, and complicated broths didn't add much to the finished sauce. So I looked for a quicker way to get maximum flavor. Bertolli also offers a recipe for a simpler ragu from southern Italy. He braises a 5-pound blade-in beef chuck steak with pancetta, tomatoes, onions, and herbs. Although he doesn't add wine or milk, he does use plenty of tomato conserva and also that expensive and time-consuming beef broth. Bertolli serves the ragu as two courses, the tomato sauce with pasta and the meat alongside braised vegetables.

I made the southern-style ragu, but replaced the chuck steak with beef short ribs. Bertolli's beef broth seemed unnecessary since I was cooking the meat on the bone. Instead of tomato conserva, I used a tube of tomato paste from the grocery store. I liked Blumenthal's star anise innovation, so I added a couple of those. The sauce was thick and bright and impossibly rich. I served it, meat and all, over dried rigatoni topped with a drizzle of fruity olive oil, and a dusting of pecorino Romano . Not the only way to make a sturdy ragu, but definitely a good one.