Vegan Seitan and Mushroom Ragù Bolognese Recipe

A Bolognese sauce is defined by meat and dairy, which makes creating a convincing vegan version a real challenge. This one pulls it off by combining the flavor and textural qualities of mushrooms and seitan, and building in layer upon layer of savory, meaty, and rich flavor.

I build the ragù much the way I would if I were using meat, starting by sautéing minced aromatic vegetables, like onion, carrot, celery, and garlic, in olive oil until they're tender and beginning to turn golden. Then, instead of adding meat, I add my meat substitute.

I use two things to stand in for meat. First, mushrooms, which are an obvious choice, thanks to their deeply savory flavor. But I didn't want to go 100% mushrooms, since mushrooms also have a distinctly earthy flavor, and a texture that's a little silkier than that of ground meat. If I were to use only mushrooms, my sauce would taste exactly like a mushroom ragù—which is a beautiful thing, but not my goal here.

To round out the mushrooms, I use an equal quantity of seitan, also known as wheat gluten. It's a wet, chewy, and spongy substance with a mild and oddly bread-like flavor, but it absorbs other flavors well. It also really wins in the texture department, with a bite that's a lot more like meat.

To give both the mushrooms and the seitan an appropriately ground-meaty texture, I crush and tear them by hand into little pieces. You could save time by chopping them, but those clean cuts won't deliver an important textural cue that tricks your mouth into thinking it's eating ground beef.

In the pot, I cook the mushrooms and seitan until the mushrooms have dumped all their liquid and have started to brown. This can take a while because seitan is quite wet as well, which slows down the browning process. Once the browning does start, I stir in a large spoonful of tomato paste, then follow it with a generous dose of wine.

I prefer white wine in a classic Bolognese, but in this vegan sauce, I need my smokescreens, and red wine has a more robust flavor that flirts with your taste buds more—and the more flirting your taste buds get from the red wine, the less they'll notice that you're not eating meat.

Once the raw alcohol smell of the wine has cooked off, I add a can of puréed tomatoes—I prefer to start with canned whole tomatoes and purée them myself—followed by even more flavor smokescreens: rosemary and sage sprigs, soy sauce, and red miso.

Those woodsy herbs are a classic pairing with Italian braised and grilled meats, so they're perfect for suggesting meat even when it isn't there. The soy sauce and miso, meanwhile, while clearly not traditional, add complexity and deep savoriness that normally come from the meat itself.

My final touch for the sauce is a scoop of flavorless refined coconut oil. Its role is to add the silkiness and richness of emulsified beef fat in a classic Bolognese sauce. Without it, the sauce is too lean, a dead giveaway that it's a vegan impostor.

After the sauce has stewed for a while and grown thick, I stir in a little bit of my vegan béchamel to make the ragù lightly creamy. Now it's ready to be used in your vegan lasagna alla Bolognese.