Pasta Sauce as a Condiment (In the Ketchup Sense)

Generally, I don’t bother with jarred sauce for pasta. True, I do pick up a jar if I’m looking for alfredo — I’m currently not that great at making cheese sauces anyway, but I also don’t care for the effort involved except for special occasions. For example, one time, I sat in the tiny communal kitchen for our residence hall’s first floor for about an hour nursing a special blue cheese alfredo that needed constant stirring. Needless to say, my care led to me boiling rather than the sauce, but it was tasty. And for a special occasion.

Nevertheless, sometimes it’s handy to have a jar of tomato-based sauce on hand to use for seasoning other dishes (it’s great with scrambled eggs) or making a quick lunch (mmm, pizza sandwiches). For such a task, I don’t want to lay out eight or 10 bucks for a fancy concoction with a celebrated name attached, but nor do I want to be super cheap and get a very smooth, flavorless sauce when the goal is to add interest to my dishes.

I’ve found that Barilla’s pasta sauce is a good compromise. The Basilico featured here that I found at Tesco (I’m sorry, the page is in German — just be glad it’s not in Slovak) is wonderfully chunky, with tons of huge hunks of tomato throughout. It’s neither sweet nor bitter, like a lot of jarred sauce. In fact, with all those chunks, it tastes mostly of ripe tomato, with enough seasoning to earn the term “sauce.”

It’s not bad for you, either. A half-cup serving has 70 calories, three grams of fiber, two grams of fat (which is good as fat makes more nutrients in the tomato available to your body), and only eight grams of sugar. I don’t even use half a cup per serving myself for the ways I use jarred sauce, either, so it’s a calorically cheap way for me to flavor my meals.

Now, I still have nothing against my old standby, Hunt’s sauce in a can. I still think if you’re the sort of person who prefers to get prepared spaghetti sauce rather than making your own, you can’t go wrong with this stuff. Most jarred sauce is terrible, anyway, and I can’t even tell you how Barilla’s sauce is on pasta as I don’t use it for that application. Hunt’s is easy to jazz up with a can of diced tomatoes and some garlic, making it a gateway to trying your hand at homemade sauce. Oh, and it’s super-cheap — great for college students.

Barilla’s Puttanesca sauce, which I’ve tried in America, is pretty good, too, by the way. If you’re not up to making puttanesca on your own, it’s worth picking up. It’s chock full of both black and green olives, and thus an excellent change of pace from the usual chunky pasta sauce.

Recipe of the Day: Caprese Antipasticks

Love It: I can close my eyes and picture those creamy, firm balls of fresh mozzarella — I can practically taste them. To me, eating fresh mozzarella is closer to drinking an icy cold glass of milk than to eating a typical cheese. But I digress. Here we have an adorable little appetizer spin on that summertime classic, caprese salad. Aww.

Fear It: It’s so easy to eat a ton of these since they look so tiny! But those bocconcini and that olive oil mean moderation is necessary.

Teach It: Rachael Ray also makes a version of this appetizer with salami, provolone, and pepperoncini. There’s no reason to stop there! Almost any appetizer you might put out in a bowl could be made into a mini-kabob. Think olives, various cheeses and cured meats, dried fruits, cooked meats, fresh fruits like grapes . . .

Eat It: With cocktails and friends or “the game” and family. One helpful hint — unless you’re planning to stick these into some craft styrofoam to make some sort of kabob bouquet, there’s no reason to go to the trouble of skewers. Pretty toothpicks are plenty big enough and look less intimidating to guests. But make sure to only skewer one serving per stick if you do go the larger route!

Caprese Antipasticks
Source: Rachael Ray
Yield: 8 servings . . . assuming your guests eat no other hors d’oeurves

• 1 package 8-inch bamboo skewers
• 1 pint cherry or grape tomatoes
• 2 (1-pound) tubs bocconcini (small balls of fresh mozzarella), drained
• 24 leaves fresh basil
• Extra-virgin olive oil, for drizzling
• Salt and pepper

For caprese sticks, skewer tomatoes and bocconcini bites, placing basil leaves between them. Drizzle these sticks with extra-virgin oil and season with salt and pepper, to your taste.

Download Caprese Antipasticks into MacGourmet.

Blazy’s Pepperoni Studded Lasagna

Love It: Pepperoni! My favorite cured sausage, spicy with just enough grease. Plus, we’ve got here the merging of two yummy comfort foods, pizza and lasagna. Finally, it’s got Italian sausage, and Scott loves sausage.

 

Fear It: All that cheese and sausage equals diet disaster. We might have some serious self-control issues when presented with such a delightful, melty, spicy, cheesy concoction.

 

Teach It: Guy Fieri cooks the pepperoni in a skillet before adding it to the lasagna, reducing the sausage’s grease factor (no surface pools!) while releasing that spicy fat for another use (like making some extra-porky pasta sauce).

 

Eat It: I’d suggest serving alongside some salad out of a sack and Diet Rite from a two-liter, as if you’d just gotten some delivery from Little Papa Hutino’s.

Blazy’s Pepperoni Studded Lasagna
Source: Guy Fieri
Yield: 8-10 servings

• 2 lbs. lasagna sheets
  
• 2 cups hand cut 1/8-inch slices pepperoni
  
• 4 cups tomato sauce, recipe follows
  
• 1 lb. ricotta
  
• 16 ounces shredded mozzarella
  
• 2 lbs. bulk Italian sausage, cooked
  
• ¾ cup grated Parmesan
  

Preheat oven to 375 degrees F.

Boil 6 quarts of water, add pinch of salt, and cook pasta to almost done. Remove from water and shock in ice bath.

In medium saucepan add pepperoni and saute over medium heat until crispy. Remove from heat and drain on a paper towel.

In a 10-by-14-by-3-inch baking pan or dish, pour 1 cup of tomato sauce in bottom and around sides. Layer lasagna sheets on the bottom of the pan, overlapping by 1/2-inch. Add 1/3 amount of ricotta, 1/3 amount of mozzarella, 1/3 amount of sausage, then sprinkle generously with the Parmesan, add 1/2 cup tomato sauce, and 1/4 cup of pepperoni. Repeat this 2 more times.

On the very top sheet, top with remaining ricotta, tomato sauce, mozzarella, pepperoni, and dust with Parmesan. Bake for approximately 45 minutes. Remove from oven; let sit for 15 minutes. Cut and serve immediately.

Tomato Sauce:
3 ounces extra-virgin olive oil
1 yellow onion, minced
5 medium-sized garlic cloves, crushed
6 cups skinned and diced Roma tomatoes
2 tablespoons thinly sliced fresh basil leaves
1 tablespoon minced fresh oregano leaves
Salt and freshly ground black pepper

In a medium saucepan, heat olive oil. Add onion and cook over medium to low heat until transparent. Add garlic and cook until almost brown. Then add tomatoes and cook for 1/2 hour over low to medium heat. Add the basil and oregano and continue to cook for another 1/2 hour. Season, to taste, with salt and pepper, cool and store in the refrigerator until ready to use.

Download Blazy’s Pepperoni Studded Lasagna into MacGourmet.

Saucy and Rebellious

Fresh off of getting yet another scolding from Mario Batali about how we Americans (which, last I checked, included hailing-from-Seattle Batali) over-sauce our pasta, a grayish light shines down from heaven: The Minimalist says we don’t have to minimize the saucy goodness.

 

And it’s about time. I’m tired of being stalked by the Italian pasta polizia.

 

I’m not saying I’m always a pasta drowner. I don’t even know how much sauce must be considered a drowning. I certainly don’t end up with an excess when I make spaghetti alla carbonara, but I do enjoy ample tomato and meat sauces on my pasta.

 

And why not? Pasta has lots of carbohydrates but little fiber. It’s not offering a lot, nutritionally speaking. Plus, for most Americans, I think the problem is more that we put too much pasta on our plates rather than too much sauce.

 

I mean, come on — Rachael Ray is always saying a full pound of dry noodles serves only four. That’s 400 calories already without any sauce at all. Still, even that much isn’t enough at a restaurant — at the Sbarro in my university’s student center, an order of spaghetti with plain tomato sauce clocked in at about 820 calories with a weight of one and a quarter pounds.

 

More and more, I like my pasta to be an accent to a dish full of vegetables and lean meats rather than the main event. I don’t feel so bad about eating pasta when I know it’s a reasonable portion.

 

Lest we forget, another tenet of the Italian pasta-serving gospel is that pasta should be the small first course, not the entrée. On all of the menus I looked at in Italy on my honeymoon, the pasta and pizza we Americans would consider main courses were separated out from the list of entrées. Also, every pasta dish I got came in a small bowl with a portion half the size you’d expect at an Olive Garden or Macaroni Grill.

 

I’d like to share this portion of Bittman’s column:

 

As the years went by, though, a kind of “if it’s Italian, it must be good” mentality developed here, and home cooks began enjoying pasta with a minimum of sauce. (We also began undercooking it, just to show that we could take al dente one ridiculous step further.)

But today, barely moistened pasta often doesn’t make sense. Even setting aside the extreme recommendations of the Atkins diet, it’s widely agreed that highly refined grains — a group that includes the semolina flour from which the best-tasting dry pasta is made — do us little nutritional good. From the point of view of the body, there’s little difference between pasta and white bread (and, for that matter, biscotti); neither has much in the way of protein, vitamins, micronutrients or fiber, and all are digested quickly and may ultimately be stored as fat.

 

Ahhh.

 

The release of some tagliatelle tension.

 

Go check out the recipes from the column for more cooking fun.