Look, Ma! No Jar!
Since I started working from home, I tend to cook my lunches (rather than nuke them), but I still want them to be fast and easy. Pasta's great for that, since it takes about 10 minutes to make, but any sauce that doesn't come out of a jar tends to be more of a production than I want to deal with at lunch.
I've been working on a pretty simple technique for a nice tomato sauce that doesn't need to come out of a jar, but which tastes like an actual sauce, takes very little time to cook and is suitable for single portions.
Food to stock:
1 clove of garlic
1 medium tomato or 2 roma tomatoes if available
1 tablespoon of olive oil
1 parmeggiano to taste
1 tsp of sugar (optional)
2 pinches of salt
pinch of pepper
100g of pasta
Dishes to wash after:
1 largish pot for pasta
1 very small pot for sauce - not non-stick
Cutting board
Serrated knife
Metal fork
Slotted spoon
Regular spoon
Things to do:
- Fill the large pot with water, add a pinch of salt and set it on high heat to boil.
- Set the small pot over medium heat to warm.
- Peel and finely slice the garlic.
- Throw the garlic in the small pot and add the olive oil. Stir and leave to sizzle.
- By this point, the water in the large pot should be near boiling. Score an X on the bottom of your tomato and use the slotted spoon to lower it into the water in the pot.
- Count to 20.
- Remove the tomato using the slotted spoon and put it on your cutting board.
- Add pasta to the boiling water (stir it occasionally), turn the heat down to medium and let it boil.
- Turn the heat under the small pot up to high.
- By the time you've put the pasta in the boiling water, the tomato is cool enough to touch. Peel off the skin from the score marks you made. It should come off easily.
- Dice the tomato into a small dice.
- Add half of the tomato to the small pot, which should be sizzling, but not yet burning. Instant steam should spring up.
- Add salt and pepper and optional sugar and stir vigorourly with the metal fork for about a minute. Mash the tomatoes up as you stir to help break them down.
- Add the rest of the tomatoes, lower the heat to medium-high and let the sauce boil together until the pasta is done, stirring occasionally. If the sauce starts to get dry (that's actually a good sign!) add some water from the pasta pot to thin it out again, a soup spoon or two at a time.
- When the pasta is cooked, drain it, return it to the pot, then pour the tomato sauce over it from the other pot. Toss them together.
- Sprinkle parm to taste
- Taste
The pasta sauce comes together pretty well, with the broken down tomatoes from the first mushing and sauteeing blended in with the chunkier tomatoes from the second bunch. It develops a nice, fresh flavour. And most importantly, the whole thing takes about 12 minutes, start to finish.