this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2026
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PS. I'm heading to the shop now to buy all the ingredients I need to make this, gota start soon else I'll eat way too late.
Can't not make it at least once a week.
Can you make a big batch and save some leftovers in the fridge or freezer? I think it's great that you have perfected it, I'm happy for you.
I'll try that once, but I doubt it will be the same. My oven & microwave have been broken for like 3 months so I've been learning to cook a lot!!
It's also pretty good for my mental health to have to run to the shop every day and make food, else I just end up on the computer all day.
So I kinda force myself to cook and go to the shops most days
Being in the same situation, I ended up getting some big, silicon "ice cube" trays (if you used them for ice cubes the cubes would be huge). Each slot holds ~a serving of pasta sauce.
We'll make up batches of sauce and freeze them in these trays. Then you can pop a cube into a saucepan, add some cream (or other liquid base that makes sense for the sauce) and heat it up while you make the pasta.
In my experience it works and tastes great, and makes it super easy for when you don't have time or energy to cook.
That sounds great, I'll give that a try
We do that with home made sloppy joe sauce. A muffin cup is perfect for one sloppy joe serving.
We did this with tomato paste, since every recipe that uses it only ever needs 1 tbsp, and it's sold in... idk, 6 oz? cans... put 1 tbsp dollops into an icecrube tray, froze em, then popped em out and threw them into a plastic bag and right back into the freezer. Now we just grab a tomato cube whenever we need one.
My mother in law makes huge portions of her pasta sauce and freezes it in smaller portions to give to us. Heats up just fine in a pan on the stovetop. It may be a little more watery, but I’m sure you could just simmer a bit longer once it’s up to temp to thicken it out.
You can reheat the sauce in a pan and just boil up some fresh pasta.
Of course it won't be 100%, but it'll be 100 times better than your old go-to and just as easy.
When you do the leftovers, pan-fried spaghetti feels very different and is also super delicious. Let it dry out a bit as it cooks, seems like bad instructions, but it's so good.
Edit: I should note, this starts with the sauce and noodles already mixed. Ideally when put away, so the noodles absorb the sauce over a few days. If your diet allows for it, adding your cooking fat of choice is of course very much recommended for frying in a pan.
You can just heat the bolognese up in a pan after defrosting. It'll come out the same.
I've done exactly this with ragu before, worked perfectly. I don't own a microwave (don't see the point in them) so all my stuff is reheated in a pan or the oven.
I hear ya about going to the shop though, I'm in the same boat.
I usually make a massive batch and by morning it is always all gone. You can't not eat it all. Impossible.
Could you make a double or quadruple sauce recipe and freeze it? Making a bigger batch of bolognese doesn’t take significantly more time and then you can quickly reheat portions and boil the pasta for a quick weeknight meal. If you brown the meat then that would add extra time since you would need to brown one portion of meat at a time, since it will steam rather than brown if you overcrowd the pan.
My wife and I make spaghetti sauce a couple of times a year, but we make it in 2 giant stock pots and start with giant institutional cans of tomato puree and diced tomatoes, then cook and add the ground beef and Italian sausages and seasonings and then measure out portions into vacuum bags and freeze them. It takes twice as long to do those two stock pots compared to maybe two meals worth, but we get 12 meals out of that.
Want spaghetti? Grab a vacuum pack out of the freezer and put it in water to boil on the stove. When it's defrosted and warmed up, cook the noodles and dinner is ready.