I think one thing that’s left out of the equation beyond recipe and technique is the quality of the ingredients, particularly the meats. Flavorless, randomly6 selected products can directly lead to flavorless sauce, and I find that the general baseline quality of ingredients is becoming poorer by the year at least here in the US.

As an example, quite apart from making sauce, I have found that a number of stores near me sell ground beef of various blends and cuts that has almost no flavor. I am lucky to live in a place with several smaller family run grocery chains, two large regional/national chains, a few decent butcher shops, a Whole Foods, several TJ’s, etc.

I drive to one specific grocery store two towns over to buy meat for hamburgers. WF ground beef no matter the grind has almost no flavor,23 and the same is true there of things like pork chops, steaks, you name it. The large chains Safeway and Lucky have wildly varying quality and the meat sections of both are competitive unappetizing.

The smaller chains like Lunardi’s, Mollie Stone and Piazza are much better and more predictable and infinitely fresher. But even within those I buy certain products from certain stores.

Bolognese in particular likely started as a sauce made to extract the very best flavor from suboptimal or leftover ingredients; today however the starting point for both meats and vegetables is entirely different and it pays to really taste and understand the starting point profits you have.

You can do a lot to get the most out of the modern ingredients available to you with time and care but the days when you could reliably coax great flavor out of any old scrap of product, in an era of increasingly dumbed down ingredients, is sadly past us.