Mushroom sauce, mushroom ragù or mushroom sugo — however you call it — this delicious condiment for first courses that are both fancy and simple is very tasty and extremely easy to make. Today we’ll prepare a flavorful sauce with fresh mushrooms that you can also make with fresh or frozen champignon, with porcini (which I recommend mixing with mushrooms that have a milder flavor), with pleurotus, with cardoncelli, with mixed frozen mushrooms or with any type of mushroom you have available. I remember that one of the dishes my grandmother often cooked was mushroom ragù; she used it to dress pasta, but being from Trentino she also sometimes used it on polenta — and I won’t deny I loved it. Grandma’s mushroom sauce was thick, full-bodied, red and delicious; my goodness, it smelled amazing — I still remember it! Today I want to share with you my grandmother’s mushroom sauce recipe, or rather my grandmother’s recipe: simple and delicious. Ready? Let’s go to the kitchen and discover how to make our vegetarian sauce. Before that, if you’d like to stay updated on all my recipes you can follow my Facebook page (here) and my Instagram profile (here).
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- Difficulty: Very easy
- Cost: Very inexpensive
- Preparation time: 10 Minutes
- Cooking methods: Stovetop
- Cuisine: Italian
- Seasonality: All seasons
Ingredients to make the mushroom sauce
- 1.5 lb mushrooms (fresh or frozen, or about 3 oz dried)
- 2 cups tomato passata (strained tomatoes)
- 1 onion (medium, white)
- 1 carrot (small)
- 1 stalk celery
- 2 leaves bay leaves
- to taste salt
- 1 tsp sugar
- 2 tbsp white wine (or red)
- 1 tbsp tomato paste
Tools
- Pan
Steps to make the mushroom sauce
You can prepare the mushroom sauce with fresh mushrooms or with frozen ones, and dried mushrooms will work too. If you use fresh mushrooms you can use any type you have available — champignon, cardoncelli, porcini (I suggest mixing porcini with mushrooms that have a milder flavor): remove dirt and roots and preferably do not wash them under running water; instead gently rub them with a cloth or a damp paper towel to avoid them soaking up water. Frozen mushrooms should be cooked directly without thawing, and dried mushrooms should be soaked in warm water for about 15 minutes, then squeezed and the soaking water discarded.
Let’s start preparing our mushroom sauce: peel the onion and the carrot and finely chop them; remove the leaves and strings from the celery stalk and chop it as well. Once you have the soffritto, sauté it in a good splash of olive oil and let it soften. Add the mushrooms and cook over high heat for a few minutes; if using frozen mushrooms wait until all the liquid has evaporated.
Deglaze with the wine, and once it has evaporated add the tomato paste first and then the passata. Add the bay leaves and cook for about 20 minutes over medium heat. Near the end of cooking adjust the salt and, if you like, add a level teaspoon of sugar to enhance the flavor. To regulate the consistency of the sauce, depending on whether you want it thicker or looser, lengthen or shorten the cooking time.
The mushroom sauce keeps for two days in the fridge and you can also portion it and freeze it to use as needed.
With this amount of sauce you can dress about 1.75–2.2 lb (800g–1kg) of pasta.
