If you are an Ina Garten fan, chances are you've made her pasta alla vecchio bettola from her cookbook Foolproof. She likens the recipe to classic penne alla vodka "but with so much more flavor."
If you are unfamiliar with the recipe, what distinguishes it from other tomato sauce recipes is the method: the sauce roasts in the oven in a covered pan for 1.5 hours, during which time the liquids reduce and the flavors concentrate, resulting in a sweet-spicy mixture needing little more than a splash of cream to balance it out.
It's a sauce my whole family loves, and about this time of year every year, I start making it often.
Most recently I simplified the method ever so slightly. The original recipe calls for draining two 28-oz cans of peeled tomatoes, a step which leaves you with juice to use for a future use. This step is not hard by any means, but if I'm being honest, the juice often gets lost in my freezer.
The past few times I've made it, I've skipped this step and simply roasted the tomatoes, juice and all. It's just as delicious as ever. Get the recipe and watch the video here:
| Ina Garten's Vodka Sauce |
PS: This coming Sunday, January 17th at 5 pm, I'm teaching a virtual Bread Baking Made Simple class. In this class, we'll cover the basics of no-knead, yeast-leavened bread baking. Hope to see you there!
7 Favorite Recipes Made with Canned Tomatoes
Marcella Hazan's Tomato Sauce with White Wine & Parsley
Unlike Marcella's renowned, three-ingredient tomato sauce, this one calls for olive oil and sautéed onions, a few cloves of crushed garlic, a little white wine, some chopped fresh parsley, and a pinch of crushed red pepper flakes. After about 20 minutes of simmering, it's done. And it's delicious.
Pantry Tomato Soup
This pantry tomato soup is a staple all winter long. As you can imagine, it's great aside grilled cheese sandwiches.
Butter-Roasted Tomato Sauce
Like Ina's vodka sauce recipe, this one calls for roasting canned tomatoes with butter and anchovies and lots of garlic, which caramelize and sweeten in the oven. Unlike Ina's sauce, this one roasts uncovered, so it takes less time, about 40 minutes before it becomes jammy and concentrated and ready to be puréed.
Winter Enchilada Sauce
This sauce, made with canned tomatoes, chipotle in adobo sauce, and broiled onions and garlic comes together in about 15 minutes. I love using it in this lasagna-style enchilada "casserole":
Leblebi (North African Chickpea Stew)
Made with canned or cooked-from-scratch chickpeas, crushed tomatoes, onions, garlic, and spices, this is a winter favorite. If you're up for it, serve it with homemade harissa.
Instant Pot Chicken Tinga
This recipe calls for crushed tomatoes and chipotles in adobo. If you don't have an Instant Pot, you can make it stovetop.
Pantry Puttanesca
The hardest part about making this sauce is smashing a few cloves of garlic and coarsely chopping a half cup of olives. The rest comes from pantry staples: plum tomatoes, anchovies (a whole tin!), capers (a whole jar!).
After an hour of simmering, the plum tomatoes break down, the anchovies dissolve, the cloves of garlic melt. The sauce can certainly be made ahead and the pasta cooked just before dinner, which makes for easy preparations at the dinner hour.
Happy Cooking,
Love what you're reading? Click here to receive an alert every time I post a new recipe.
No comments:
Post a Comment