My family loves this easy Mushrooms Beef Pasta Sauce. We use it over pasta and sometimes over rice too. We often mix it with spaghetti, linguine or bucatini pasta for a comforting family meal and serve alongside a green salad like this lettuce and dill salad. Recipe can easily be doubled for meal planning and it stores really well in refrigerator.
What type of mushrooms to use for this recipe?
I like to make dinner easy on myself, especially on weekdays. If I ever find sliced white mushrooms on sale in my grocery store, I grab two boxes and I know they’d be great in this pasta sauce.
Feel free to check out my Sausage and Mushrooms Pasta dinner recipe or the Grilled Portobello recipe if you like mushroom recipes:).
My Grandparents’ Beef Pasta Sauce
My grandparents used to prepare an awesome ground beef pasta sauce. They cooked it on low heat over our wood oven stovetop.
Over the years, I have tried to replicate their beef pasta sauce recipe with little success until recently. The ground beef sauces I used to make were good, even great but they weren’t my grandparents’ recipe. I blamed it on my memory and lack of a family recipe book. We all cooked by eyeballing ingredients and quantities.
Little by little I realized that I had the list of ingredients right. What was missing was time & patience!! So I decided to try the recipe again lowering the heat and letting all the ingredients simmer together slowly. And Voila!!! That did the trick!! As busy parents, we are sometimes looking for that perfect gourmet, healthy dinner cooked under 30 minutes. This recipe requires some time, but you won’t be disappointed:)
My grandparents recipe didn’t have mushrooms. So one day I decided to add mushrooms to my favorite pasta sauce. Maybe unconsciously I was trying to add more vegetables to our dinner so my kids can eat more veggies. Getting toddlers to eat veggies is a mission, so I’m in a never ending journey to stuff veggies in every meal:).
Process & Ingredients of Making this Pasta Sauce
Ingredients
This pasta sauce is so easy to make. Here are most the ingredients I used to make it (missing from the picture are garlic, salt/pepper and ground beef).
- Yellow onion
- Garlic Cloves
- Ground beef
- Plum tomatoes
- Tomato Sauce
- Beef Broth
- Oregano, Bay Leaves and fresh parsley
- White mushrooms
- Salt/pepper to taste
Process
Start by cooking finely diced onion and minced garlic in olive oil, then browning ground beef in it. Slowly add crushed plum tomatoes, tomato sauce and broth. Then add all the seasonings. Let the ground beef sauce cook on slow heat.
Then add mushrooms and parsley around 40 minutes in and let cook for another 15-20 minutes in low heat.
This pasta sauce is also low carb if you were to eat it with a side salad or steamed veggies instead of pasta. Whenever my husband and I try to do a bit of low carb diet, this is one of our favorite recipes. My husband and I would eat it with salad and the kids with pasta. This way I don’t have to cook 2 separate dinners for my family.
Cook your favorite pasta al dente. As seen below, I’ve cooked bucatini pasta. If your skillet is large and deep enough, transfer the pasta over the sauce and using spaghetti tongs mix the sauce with the pasta carefully together. If sauce is not saucy enough, add a bit of the reserved pasta water which helps tie everything together and makes for a silky finish.
Serve right away and add parmesan cheese, freshly cracked black pepper and more fresh parsley. Bon Appetit:).
Mushrooms Beef Pasta Sauce
Equipment
- 1 large skillet make sure it's not only large but also few inches deep to fit the pasta with the sauce.
Ingredients
- 4 tbsps olive oil if ground beef has a higher % of fat, I usually do 3 tbsps of olive oil, or if the ground beef is very lean than i can add a bit more.
- 1 medium yellow onion
- 5 garlic cloves
- 1 lb ground beef
- 2 plum tomatoes use a food processor to crush
- 14 ozs tomato sauce usually 1 can
- 8 ozs beef broth
- 1 cup fresh chopped parsley
- 4 bay leaves
- 1 tbsp dry oregano
- 0.5 tsp paprika
- 10 ozs mushrooms
- salt/pepper to taste
Instructions
- Saute minced garlic and finely chopped onion with olive oil over medium heat.
- When onion becomes translucent, add ground beef and stir often so onion doesn’t get burnt.
- Once meat is browned well, then add the crushed plum tomatoes and the can of tomato sauce. Add the beef broth as well. Mix well and stir slowly until sauce starts to boil. Lower heat to low. Make sure the plum tomatoes are soft so they can provide enough juice for cooking the sauce.
- Add bay leaves, parsley, paprika and oregano. Stir occasionally and let it simmer on low temperature. If you cook it on higher temps, sauce will dry up and burn. You want to keep the temperature low. Keep the pan covered when you're not stirring.
- Add salt/pepper and mushrooms around 40 minutes. Mix well, let it simmer again for another 20 minutes. Let it cool down, serve over favorite pasta, rice or with a side of salad. If the skillet you're using is large enough to accomodate the pasta as well, add the al dente pasta and mix with the sauce right there. Bon Appetit!
Notes
- You can add more ground beef than what I did to this recipe and adjust the sauce consistency by adding a bit more broth or more crushed tomatoes.
- I say use salt/pepper to taste because borth usually has salt in it so you have to adjust salt / pepper to taste based on that.
- If you serve sauce individually over pasta in each plate, than you can store the leftover sauce in an airtight container in the refrigerator for 3-4 days. Reheat leftovers over medium heat in a pan.
Nutrition Label
Nutrition
You definitely can, it makes for a great recipe. I love spinach in both soups and pasta sauces so it’s a great choice. Add towards the end so it has time to welt but not overcook.
You can use long pasta like spaghetti, linguine, bucatini etc. I also like fusilli and rotini type pasta because the sauce will get in between the cork shape of the fusilli.
If you would like to save this recipe for later, please add to your dinner boards in Pinterest so you can easily retrieve the recipe later. Let me know in comments if you have any questions or feedback. Feel free to tag me in social media with your pictures of this recipe, I’d love to see which pasta type you used:). Thank you for reading my blog.
Instagram: mediterranean_latin_love or Facebook: Mediterranean Latin Love Affair.
Additional Dinner Recipes
I have many more dinner recipes in my blog, feel free to check some of them out:).
- Chicken in creamy sun dried tomatoes sauce
- Sheet pan Mediterranean chicken and veggies
- Baked potatoes and sausages
- Braised beef shanks in Dutch Oven
Note – This recipe was first published in January 2019 and updated with pictures and more tips for cooking it in March 2023.
Holly Bird
I made this!! It is awesome I highly recommend this it is easy to make and the family loves it!!
admin
Holly, thank youuuu for trying it out!!! You are the best:))). If you have any tips , feel free to share in comments.
I feel the tomato consistency might be the biggest ?? because it can make the sauce more watery or more dry so that has to be eye balled a bit.
Holly Bird
I wouldn’t change a thing, the taste was unique, and really satisfying!
Edel
My mouth is watering and now I want to make the sauce and serve it over rice. I know, not so good choice, but for some reason, it seems it will taste better hehe. I agree that before, our pace was slower and we took time to do things without the rush of now. Thanks for the recipe!
Sheila
Great recipe! I am going to try it. What if I don’t have plum tomatoes?
admin
Any tomatoes should work as long as they are not green or hard. I usually buy them few days before for salads and whatever I didn’t use in salads gets soft few days later and that’s what i use for sauces.
Lusine
I will try this sauce next time I make pasta. It needs a try!
Sonila
Feel free to add more tomatoes to your taste and/or a looser consistency in the sauce. Enjoy:)
Lorraine
Looks great Sonila! And yes the best food is the ones cooked with love and patience. My hubby always says my food tastes better when I’m not rushing the cooking process.
admin
Definitely that’s the secret ingredient!!