Make a big batch once per week on the weekend and portion it out into easy, freezable individual servings. It can still be your easy go-to meal if you make a week or two worth of sauce all at once. Cook the pasta fresh, reheat your frozen sauce in a microwave, combine and enjoy.
this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2026
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This! Batch cook & enjoy!
Bolognese is obe of my favorites as well, but it's like a 4-5 hour process, yeah. Feeds me for a solid week, though, more than anything else I cook.
Make a bunch and freeze it, now you have premade meals of the good shit whenever you want.
If it doesn't freeze well as a final product, do the prep and freeze the individual components separately. Later all you have to do is thaw and fry/boil. End result tastes not quite made fresh - you can still tell - but often much better than just freezing and reheating the cooked product.
Huh, I've been making marinara for the last 3 summers and it freezes great.
Yeah the marinara is probably not going to change much from being frozen; it's the meats and veggies I was thinking mostly about.
In OP's shoes, I'd make a big batch of the the most basic version of the marinara sauce, portion it out and freeze it; then prep the meat and veggies up to being ready to be sauteed and freeze them separately.
When it's time to cook a meal, thaw out a block of each and get some noodles going, sautee the meat and veggies, mix with the sauce, add the noodle when they're ready, and nom.
When I do meal prep, that's usually my approach: don't cook it up to completion and then freeze (works, but the taste/texture is often a bit off); but prep it up to the last couple of steps so that when my lazy ass gets off of work later in the week, I'm 10 minutes and a single frying pan away from an actually decent meal.
Marinara seems like it would, but some things don't. I assume they meant freezing stuff separately only when freezing it finished doesnt turn out well
Freezing sauce is fine. I never learned canning when we made sauce from the garden, we sealed and froze.
The noodles cooked in sauce as its final dish, shouldn't be frozen, no. The texture of the noodles will be wonky.
My advice to Op would be to batch the sauce and freeze it. Make fresh noodles when you use it.
This is the way. I’ve got little frozen containers of spag bol and Mexican beans and mince sitting in the freezer ready for dinner when ever. The trick is to get a giant ass fry pan and just make up a fuck ton of what ever you happen to be cooking and have a bunch of freezer safe containers.
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.
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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.
Does it freeze well? When I used to be extra as hell with Bolognese, I would do batch cooking and it went pretty well, especially if I wasn't super lazy with how I defrosted it.
Probably, but I think it just won't be the same again
You are correct, putting something in the fridge/ freezer will deepen the flavor, freezing it for later may in fact, work better and you might just end up with something tastier in the long run.
Or can it be canned easily?
Why not make it in bulk once a week, enough for a few servings? And I probably don’t need to tell you this… but keep it in the fridge/freezer
Also please share the recipe, I’m interested!
Excellent work, that just means you need a new dish to iterate on! And the cycle can continue.
Maybe in future experimentation try to prioritize timeliness? That's easier said than done though. Your journey with bolognese is similar to mine with shakshuka, so I feel I understand. It's impossible to turn off my desire to improve things and resulting brainstorms on the topic.
Making my own tortillas has done this to tacos for me. It doesn't add a ton of complexity, but the extra time takes what was a super fast zero effort process, and now makes it about as involved as any other simple dish to cook. But it's SO much better that I can never go back.
You can go further. I also make my sauce from scratch, but then pressure cook some beef chuck or shanks in it with red wine. Then I make my own pasta to go with.
And it’s good it takes so long because I would be too fat to make it otherwise.
I've once made pasta with a friend who had her own pasta roller (not sure what it's called), it was a lot of fun. I'm definitely keen of getting one, one day. Adding more effort lol
My own mother cursed me by getting me one for Christmas. Now I can’t stand the stuff from the store.
Its also nice because you get to make stuffed pastas that just don't exist in normal stores! Love it.
And lasagna with fresh pasta. It’s sooo much better
Sounds nice, I personally like taking time to cook good food. Can we have the recipe?
There's no prize to perfection, only an end to pursuit
I hear you, but you might be able to decouple the lazy version and the fancy one. I love pasta al pesto. I have the lazy version (sauce from the store, chuck it in) and the fancy version (start with basil…). One is a comfort food in rough times, the other a delicacy I can only savor a handful of times a year. Both are great in their respective roles.
I'm blursed with a weak sense of smell/taste. This can't happen to me, I would barely be able to tell the two recipes apart. But on the other hand, I'm pretty sure I'm missing a lot of the enjoyment people have with really good food.
Tasting is also a skill. It takes practice and focus to notice these things.
I'm pretty sure in my case it's either genetic or the result of actual damage to my olfactory nerves.
Simple solution.
Get a big, big pot and make a f%%k ton of sauce once a month.
Get containers and freeze them.
I make chili and lentil soup this way; I've got plenty of each sitting in the freezer. I mostly keep it for days I am sick or just don't feel like cooking.
If you don't have a good sized freezer check online. You can find one that's about as much floor space as a chair that holds plenty.
I know what you mean, but there's hope yet. If you specifically don't want advice... ignore quite a lot of this, I guess, I'm just grabbing the excuse to nerd out
If you have a freezer, you're good, bolognese is decent freezer food, you can prep a silly amount and "flatpack", and be set for ages.
Browning the meat doesn't sound like a huge part of the overall effort, but if it's a pain, halfass or skip it. You don't need a separate pot, just do it in your main one. Depends on how set you are on the browned flavors, one upside to browning less of it is that it'll be more tender since the meat structure seizes up on aggressive heating.
Mincing veg, maybe especially the carrot, is a fucking pain, but you can grate or process them instead, or conceivably just skip the carrots at least. Especially with the processor it's stupid quick and you can freeze that too, since it goes in a wet cook and the texture isn't important.
Anything you do skip, there's probably a way to "cheat" and at least partially make up for it. Beef fond, soy, Maggi and/or fish sauce, sugar, onion/garlic granules, maybe a careful pinch of some warming spices or cocoa. Adds "complexity" and whatnot from shelf stable stuff that doesn't need prepping
(Since you mentioned fiber, I can endorse lentils with/besides/instead of the meat too. Red split lentils stew down really easily and add body)
I bought one of these, and it's amazing!! It saves a TON of time and has now halved the effort.
It still has to simmer for a long time, but that's fairly chilled
Make a big-ass batch once every month or three. Freeze 90% of it to eat later. Cooking 10x as much is not much more effort than cooking 1x.
This is meal prep. Lots of people devote one day a week to cooking all their meals for the coming week. They portion it, freeze it and eat those meals all week. That's great for busy folks or those who need a reginented meal plan. Not so great for people like me who say, I don't want to eat any of this shit.. Lol
That might be up your alley.
Spag bol is one of my faves too, and like yours has evolved into pure deliciousness. To mix it up one time I made the mince into meatballs, fried them while the sauce simmered, then added them to the sauce for more simmering while the spaghetti cooked. That was incredible, but too many extra steps to do regularly.
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