Slow Cooker Pork Bolognese

Slow Cooker Bolognese

March 2, 2018

Servings: 6-8

Prep: 20 min

Total: 6 hr

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Slow cooking is one of the best ways to cook up a dreamy bolognese sauce. Allowing it to simmer all day enhances the rich meatiness and irresistible texture of this sauce. This will get your whole family doing a happy dance, I promise you!

By: A Wholesome New World

Ingredients

• 4 oz thick center-cut bacon, chopped coarsely
• 1 TBSP olive oil
• 1 large yellow onion, minced
• 2 celery stalks, minced
• 2 carrots, minced
• 2 lb ground meat (we recommend pork or beef)
• 1/4 cup white wine
• 2 28 oz cans crushed tomatoes (look for vine ripened)
• 1 can tomato paste
• 1 bay leaf
• Salt & Pepper
• 1/2 cup half & half cream

Directions

• Step 1 In a large pan (or the slow cooker, on sauté function), sauté the bacon over low heat about 4-5 minutes. Add olive oil to the pan, along with the onions, celery and carrots and cook over medium-low heat until soft, about 5 minutes.
• Step 2 Add the ground pork and raise the heat to medium-high. Season with salt and pepper and sauté until browned, breaking it up with a spatula. Drain the fat.
• Step 3 Add the white wine and cook until it reduces down, about 4 minutes.
• Step 4 If you used a skillet for the first two steps, transfer the pork and vegetables to the crock pot. Add the tomato paste, crushed tomatoes, and a bay leaf. Cover and set the slow cooker to low. Slow cook for 4-6 hours.
• Step 5 Once slow cooking is complete, adjust salt and pepper to taste and stir in the cream. Serve over your favorite pasta… or my burrata pasta!

When you get hit with an impromptu blizzard (in March, no less!) just about the best thing you can do is hunker down and cook something hearty. Better yet, it’s the perfect time for slow cooking and this one recipe that you won’t want to miss!

Since the storm caught us by surprise, I definitely didn’t have time to shop ahead. My office closed early today and the roads were terrible, so I came right home and stood in the front of my fridge taking an inventory of all the ingredients I could use up. I really wanted something cozy, so my immediate instinct was to make a pasta dish, but the slow cooker was really on my mind. So I decided to satisfy both of these desires! Since I had some ground pork from Blue Apron (intended originally for ginger pork meatballs) that I never got around to using this week, I decided to make a pork bolognese.

This is the perfect excuse to fill your kitchen with the smells of homestyle Italian cooking and enjoy them all day long!  See the before and after of the slow cooking process:

6 hours later…

And since I was on a roll, I decided to take my bolognese and elevate it one step further, using it as the sauce for my skillet pasta. Talk about epic blizzard eats!

This meal was so ridiculously good that it 1. distracted me from the howling winds outside and 2. resulted in SO many leftovers that I can now save this delicious dish for anymore curveball winter storms that Mother Nature decides to throw our way.