Spaghetti Bolognese Gets A Japanese Makeover
Ragu Bolognese is transformed into a weeknight supper using Japanese ingredients.
Wafū pasta, Japan’s spin on Italian classics—popular since the 1960s.
A short drive from my childhood home in a Los Angeles suburb there are a few Japanese restaurants specializing in yoshoku or wafū pasta. Yoshoku describes Western dishes adapted to the Japanese palate. Tonkatsu (fried pork cutlet) is a good example, but when it comes to pasta, the quintessential example is spaghetti Napolitan (also spelled “Naporitan”), made with bell peppers, mushrooms, onion, cured meat and ketchup. Yes, ketchup.
By contrast, wafū puts a Japanese imprimatur on a dish through the use of Japanese ingredients and flavors, such as dashi, shoyu (soy sauce), nori or shiso. My personal wafū-pasta favorite is a classic: mentaiko (spicy cod roe) spaghetti. Ume-shiso pasta is another standard, along with mushrooms seasoned with shoyu.
Bolognese-style meat sauce lands somewhere between yoshoku and wafū. So when we set out to create a richly flavored but quicker version of Bolognese ragu, we turned to the Japanese approach of relying on glutamate-rich ingredients. We started with sautéed aromatics using passata (bottled Italian tomato sauce) as our tomato product. Our first Japanese flavor-booster was shoyu; two tablespoons was enough. Miso picked up where the shoyu left off for a creamier, clingier sauce. Basic miso types—either mild white or more assertive red, or a combination—do perfectly well. Sake contains amino acids and glutamates, with wide-ranging flavor nuances. We used a splash to deglaze the pan, but you could use white wine instead. We also added rice vinegar for balance.
Ground beef is typical for meat sauces but pork is superior. The protein make-up of ground beef keeps it firm and bouncy unless it is tenderized by long cooking. Ground pork, on the other hand, has a slow-simmered softness even if only briefly cooked. Additionally, the mildness of pork was especially well-suited to the sauce that, although savory, also leans sweet.
There’s little arguing about pasta shape here. The sauce needs to be served spaghetti house–style—on spaghetti. But if you prefer the heartiness of bucatini, well, that’s fine, too.
Miso can be stubborn when it comes to dilution. This is why we first thin it with liquid. Also, prolonged cooking dulls miso’s fermentation flavors, so to preserve its complexity, we add it near the end of cooking.
Dawn Yanagihara
A native of Southern California who, as a kid, spent many summer weeks in her parents’ home state of Hawaii, Dawn Yanagihara studied studio art and French language and literature in—where else?—upstate New York. After graduating and spending half a year trying to figure things out, she realized she was much better at making food than art and preferred to eat madeleines than read about them. So she attended culinary school on the East Coast and took courses in pâtisserie and viennoiserie at École Lenôtre in France. In Boston, she worked late nights and early mornings as an assistant pastry chef in an esteemed French bistro where she learned restaurant baking wasn’t exactly her cup of tea. She then accepted a job as test cook at Cook’s Illustrated magazine and has been in food publishing ever since—as a recipe developer, copywriter, website editor, author, cookbook editor, and food editor. Now living back in Los Angeles, she is still very keen on baking, loves sweets, and is smitten with the food and culture of Thailand. She chooses cocktails over wine, waffles over pancakes, and onion rings over French fries.
