This Knockout Tomato Sauce Recipe Doesn’t Use Onions or Garlic
Tomato passata is a strained Italian tomato puree, available at such stores as Whole Foods.
(Bloomberg) -- Editor’s Note: As we leave our home kitchens to dine out more, the weekly Lunch Break column has evolved to highlight dishes from a variety of sources: a new or reopened restaurant; a newsmaking person, place, or recipe; or, of course, a great cookbook.
These days, when a luxury food like caviar is almost as ubiquitous as pasta, where does that leave pasta?
If the spaghetti and linguine strands are in the hands of Missy Robbins, they’re in an enviable position. Robbins has been the queen of pasta in New York and across the country since 2016, when she opened Lilia in Williamsburg and made it one of the city’s power dining rooms.
While so many Americans continue to work from home, it’s hard to say “power dining room” with a straight face. So Robbins offers the pandemic alternative: the power cookbook.
Pasta: The Spirit and Craft of Italy’s Greatest Food, with Recipes, by Robbins and Talia Baiocchi (Ten Speed Press; Oct. 26; $40) is a commanding volume on one of the world’s best-loved foods. The photo-studded book takes you up the coastline of Liguria to the ski town of Cortina d’Ampezzo in Italy’s Dolomites and then to drowsy, sunny Puglia before depositing you back in the kitchen.
Robbins and Baiocchi offer 100 recipes for pasta dishes from their travels, including such obscure ones as culurgiones, the potato-stuffed Sardinian shapes that Robbins calls “Italy’s answer to the pierogi,” and the more familiar pasta with pesto Genovese, which she makes with fio e sardo, a gently smoky pecorino. “There are a lot of recipes, and some are a commitment—like agnoletti—but some are simple recipes. And hidden in there is so much subtle and important technique,” says Baiocchi.
One of the book’s simplest recipes is for bucatini with the time-honored spicy tomato sauce, all’amatriciana. Curiously, this is a new recipe for Robbins. “As someone who has cooked Italian food for a while, I never put a real version on a menu,” she says. “I felt like it was done.” (She also didn’t want to compete with the exceptional version at Lupa, which made it one of the city’s most popular dishes in the 2000s.) For her recipe, Robbins made the controversial decision not to add onion or garlic to the sauce, ingredients that invariably make things taste better.
“I kept going back to this idea of simplicity. It’s the ethos of my cooking; I’ve been stripping things down since I opened up Lilia,” says the chef. When she tested the recipe, “I took everything out. I left just the guanciale and pecorino.” She tasted it, and decided “this is the essence of what amatriciana should be.”
Robbins’ recipe reminds you how soul-satisfying a bowl of pasta with tomato sauce can be. The four ingredients that go into her amatriciana bring their big personalities to the party, particularly the guanciale, or cured pork jowl, which adds a potent and funky meaty kick to the sauce. Instead of cubing the guanciale, Robbins slices it so that the fatty meat melts into the sauce and pervades the flavor even more. With the heat thrown in by chile flakes, this is a pasta that muscles its way past other tomato-sauced ones to be your new favorite—and all in the 20 minutes it takes to make it.
The following recipe is adapted from Pasta, by Missy Robbins and Talia Baiocchi.
Testers note: Tomato passata is a strained Italian tomato puree, available at such stores as Whole Foods. Don’t try to substitute regular canned tomato puree; it’s not as consistently smooth in texture and taste.
Bucatini all’Amatriciana
Serves 4 to 6
2 tbsp olive oil
5½ oz guanciale, thinly sliced
2 cups tomato passata
½ tsp dried red chile flakes
1 lb to 1 lb, 6 oz bucatini
⅓ cup pecorino romano, plus ¼ cup for garnish
Heat a large sauté pan or Dutch oven over medium-low heat. Add the olive oil and guanciale and cook until the fat has rendered and the pieces are beginning to turn golden but haven’t browned, 5 to 8 minutes. Transfer one-quarter of the slices to a paper towel-lined plate.
Reduce the heat to low, add the tomato passata and chile flakes, and cook until the rawness of the tomatoes is cooked out and the flavors have melded, 8 to 10 minutes. You are not looking to reduce the sauce.
Meanwhile, bring a large pot of water to a boil. Generously salt the water. Add the bucatini and cook until just al dente, about 10 minutes. Using tongs or a pasta basket, transfer the pasta to the sauté pan. Add a splash of pasta cooking water and toss for 1 to 2 minutes to marry the pasta and the sauce.
Remove from the heat and stir in the ⅓ cup pecorino. If necessary, add a splash of pasta cooking water to loosen. When the sauce is properly incorporated, it will cling to the pasta and show a glossy sheen. Garnish with the remaining pecorino and reserved guanciale, and serve.
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