Last night I made spaghetti with a very flavorful magic red pesto.
Ingredients:
1/4c extra-virgin olive oil
1/3c sun-dried tomatoes in oil [chopped?]
1c fresh basil
2+ cloves garlic
1/3c parmesan cheese
1lb thin spaghetti
Use your imagination.
Instructions:
Use your imagination on the olive oil. [Your imagination doesn't have to be very good if you have a lot of it.] Filter the olive oil into a food processor, along with the sun-dried tomatoes, basil, garlic, and parmesan. Process until finely chopped. Cook the spaghetti. Drain the noodles, saving 1/2c of the noodle water for the pesto [I'm not sure why it has to be noodle water, but that's what the recipe says]. Add the noodle water to the pesto, mix, and toss with the noodles.
- Z
Interesting. When I was living at college on about $5/day I came up with a pretty decent sauce made almost exclusively from my roommates' nonperishables I scrounged out of the cabinets. I really didn't have time for formal processes and mother sauces - just dump it all on angel hair [cooks faster than ramen] and enjoy. It was different every time I made it, but usually involved combinations of olive oil/butter, rice vinegar, soy sauce/salt, parmesan, oregano, and fresh ground pepper. It's super-weird, but I dig the way the soy sauce and parmesan taste together, especially with the pepper. Sometimes I still make my pasta like that [or use it as a salad dressing] but now I've got fresh herbs from the garden as well.
- Z
well, given the fact that I'm staring at about 40 cookbooks or so, and am completely passionate about food let me provide some culinary education for you...
In classic french tradition we are given 5 mother sauces: the veloute, which usually is a roux thickened fish stock; the bechemel, which is the well known cream sauce; hollandaise, which is the egg emulsion; espangnol or brown sauce derived from animal stock; and the tomato sauce, which you don't like. All of these sauces can be used to create a set of secondary sauces and in one way or another have found their way to the noodle. The veloute is the primary sauce for the secondary sauce Provencal and the bechemel is the primary sauce for the secondary sauce Mornay, which is a cheese sauce used in Macaroni & Cheese or Philly Steaks (although don't tell the guy at Pat's that his canned sauce is actually a Mornay).
Most sauces start from what we call a fond, which is french for foundation. This fond is often a stock that has been cooked with animal bones and aromatics slowly for hours and hours. You can't expect to make a good sauce with out a good foundation. Whether fresh eggs and cream or a well reduced gelatinous white chicken stock this is where sauce making begins.
Another rule about saucing pasta that I leave you to explore for yourself is: The thickness of the noodle determines how thick your sauce should be (ie, angel hair vs. pappardale).
Some of my most treasured cookbook are Julia child's & Simon Beck's Matering the Art of Frenck Cooking, Janques Pepin's Complete Techniques, Tom Colicchio's Thinl Like a Chef and Mario Battali's Simple Italian Food.
I urge you to explore the exploding world of cuisine and don't let something you are not particularly fond of prevent you from trying some extraordinary cooking. You never know - the food might be prepared better and fresher than the first time you tried something.
Not really chimichurri. I wouldn't really consider it a pesto either, but that's how it's filed in Joy. The point of it is that I don't really like tomato sauce all that much, so I'm always looking for different things to put on my noodles.
- Z
so you kind of made a chimichurri with pot? What for?
As far as tha pasta water in the pesto, I've never heard that. My binder comes from the the open chemical chain in pine nuts. After I have an emulsification from the initial ingredients I add the pine nuts to secure everything. This is the same principle behind dry mustard in viniagrettes.
I think it becomes technical-virgin olive oil.
- Z
I don't think the olive oil counts as extra-virgin if you've sauteed a half-pound of freaking marijuana in it for an hour.
I beleive the basic idea on using the water from cooking noodles or pasta is that it contains starch that will help the sauce bind together better, while providing needed moisture at the same time. But i'm not a food scientist... i just watch too much of the Food Network.