Restaurants

Mince
The dish: bolognese sauce
Fancy cuts like sirloin are all very well. But it’s important, every so often, to remind ourselves that most of the meat on Time Out’s bullock, Del Boy, is fit only for braising. And what isn’t fit for braising is fit only for grinding up into mince. As Borut trims – or should that be sculpts? – joints into shape, piles of fatty, misshapen lumps amass around them. Every so often Borut scoops them up and chucks them onto a bigger pile. It looks wasteful but, as Borut explains, there isn’t really anything else you can do with this stuff except mince it.

Mince gets a bad press. Read the US Department of Agriculture’s ‘safety tips’ for ground beef and you’d think they were talking about uranium. (The best way to handle it after you’ve bought it? ‘Enclose it in a plastic bag so that any juices that do leak out won’t contaminate other items in your grocery cart.’) Then there’s the issue of what’s actually in it, though this is less of a concern if you buy it from a reputable butcher like Ginger Pig. What you can’t escape is mince’s overbearing fattiness. In 2004, the Food Standards Agency conducted a survey to check whether the amount of fat in supermarket-bought mince tallied with what was claimed on the label. In most cases it didn’t, but what’s even more interesting is the range of the variation – between 1.9g and a whacking 32.3g of fat per 100g.
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The first dish I ever learned to cook involved mince. It was spaghetti bolognese. My mother showed me how to make it before I left home for university. ‘You’ll be able to make it for your friends,’ she said. But I didn’t – only the weird Christians self-catered, and anyway, there wasn’t room in my life for cooking as well as writing glib essays, overacting in bad plays and failing to pluck up the courage to ask out Nicola Usborne, who was in the year above.

I’ve made mince a lot since, though. In fact, I probably make it once a fortnight. The recipe I use is broadly similar to my mother’s, except that she swore by pre-chopped garlic from a jar (bleurgh!) and – this amazes me now – didn’t put any wine in it. Everyone knows that wine
is essential to a good ragù. It adds depth and texture and other abstract nouns. Plus you can sip the ‘cooking’ wine while you work, reassuring yourself that, far from exhibiting alcoholic tendencies, you are ‘making sure it’s okay to cook with’. John O’Connell

Bolognese sauce
Fry onion and chopped garlic on medium heat until soft. Add 500g mince and cook until brown. Add salt and pepper; a squirt of tomato purée; one tsp of oregano; one tsp of thyme; two bay leaves. Cook for another five minutes. Add a tin of plum tomatoes, then a generous glass of red wine and a spoonful of soft brown sugar. Simmer for half an hour.

We bought our longhorn, Del Boy, at Ginger Pig. For information about Borut’s butchery classes, see www.thegingerpig.co.uk.