How To Make Vegan Eggplant Bolognese

Slow-simmered bolognese sauce ranks high among comfort dishes that make diners swoon. A well-prepared ragu of this kind takes most of the day to prepare, perfuming the whole house in the process, making it a true labor of love. The results are a deeply flavored sauce with an almost creamy texture, perfect for dressing pasta and luscious enough for impressing dinner guests. Lest you think I’m talking only of traditional meat-based bolognese, let me be clear: This is eggplant bolognese we’re discussing here, and it is just as hearty, succulent, and comforting as its meaty counterpart. And the secret is in the preparation of the eggplant.

This vegan rendition relies on a lot of the classic preparations for bolognese. There’s an aromatic soffritto to soften, wine to reduce, and the pasta is even finished in the sauce. However, to capture the robust meaty flavor of bolognese, we’re manipulating mushrooms and eggplant to add flavor and body to the sauce. Here’s a look at the major components that bring this together.

Before building the sauce, we’re baking a whole unsliced eggplant in the oven until tender. This will take at least an hour, but you can chop and dice the rest of the vegetables while the eggplant is baking. The baked eggplant lends a velvety texture to the sauce, but more importantly, baking concentrates the eggplant’s earthy flavor, which lends the necessary savory profile to the final sauce.

Mushrooms are a fairly standard meat replacement, as they have a naturally meaty flavor and chewy texture. This recipe calls for sautéing them separately from any of the other vegetables in a completely different pan. You might be tempted to throw them in with the other vegetables and skip washing a pan, but you should not do this — cooking the mushrooms on their own concentrates their flavor and also cooks off a great deal of their moisture, which prevents them from getting slimy and helps them absorb flavor from the sauce.

Soffritto (a close relative of the French mirepoix and

Spanish sofrito

There are a few sources that argue white wine as a more traditional addition to bolognese, but this vegan riff calls for two cups of red wine and here’s why: Red wine has a body and tannins that will add considerably more meaty flavor to the sauce than white. Use an inexpensive Italian red blend here — a Chianti is nice, but anything dry and not sweet will work.

Spaghetti is such an iconic pasta for bolognese, and you can certainly use it here, but using a short, tubular pasta like rigatoni or penne is highly recommended. The tube shape picks up more of the sauce and makes eating this dish even more pleasurable.