Food Lab Basics: POV Bucatini All'Amatriciana (Plus a Bonus Salad!)

hey everyone this is Kenji Lopez Alton back in my kitchen today today I'm making another Roman pasta dish bucatini all'amatriciana and i'm also gonna make a little arugula salad because so far this has just been a big cheese and carb fest here we go so bucatini all'amatriciana was named after the town of imma treat che maybe I'm pronouncing that wrong I hope I'm not but for all intents and purposes it's really a Roman pasta dish these days it's one of the classic Roman dishes you know the other ones being carbonara mmm I look really Alegria and cacio e pepe we start well this is this is a some actually some bacon it's so more similar to pancetta actually that my sous-chef Eric made traditionally you would make this with guanciale which is cured pork jowl as opposed to bacon which is cured pork belly or pancetta which is cured pork belly but all I have is Ancheta you don't have guanciale and it works just fine you can also just if you really want you can just use regular old American bacon you know the smokiness and the sweetness of that are not quite right for the dish but it's still something that comes out delicious I'm cutting nice kind of nice thick lardons here because I like a little bit of texture to it now these are gonna go to a pan here a little bit of olive oil and Chetta now there's a lot of debate about how this dish is made even you know even among traditionalists whether you know some people say add garlic's an onion some people say that completely ruins the dish I do it pretty simply I use olive oil I want Jolly black pepper red pepper flakes tomatoes and of course pecorino romano cheese which is from Lazio not from I don't know why I thought it was from emilia romagna last time I said it I when I was making my ketchup every video you know I flubbed it when I was on the spot let me wash my hands actually we're about to make a salad there in washing their hands properly in the backs getting the fingertips in between your fingers and your thumbs people forget their thumbs a lot what I tell my daughter to do is make soap gloves gonna cover your whole hands with soap every surface oh I'm gonna get that pasta going as well as I did with my country I pet the video I'm gonna start this one I'm gonna cook the pasta bucatini in a in a wide shallow skillet rather than it's sort of tall pasta pot the reason being that you want really concentrated starch in the pasta water to get the dish to if you get the sauce to really cling to the pasta I love these wooden uh I don't know chick columns bachelor things they're made by this company called early wood all hardwood they make really beautiful tools there's one of my favorites [Music] a little bit of salt alright now I'm gonna get going on the salad I mean I don't know if they watched this I don't know if my name is Emily and Brian I don't you guys watch this channel but this is from their garden some nice arugula beautiful arugula that we just went in snips oh thank you guys it's gonna give it a quick wash it's pretty clean to begin with so I don't need to do too much it very important that you get your salad greens nice and dry otherwise the dressing just runs off of them [Music] this salad spinner is from oXXO they make it in a couple sizes it's my favorite salad spinner again by the way I never do product placement ever like now I don't do any kind of paid advertising any kind of paid product placement so if I tell you I like something it's because I like it not because someone's paying me to say that I got a cucumber it's a little bit past his prime so we'll just use it up we think the skin on or take it off today um Lisa does not like the skins well speak soon I'm not gonna bother taking out the seeds cuz at least he had like seed the seeds but you could you know if you want to I was serving this at a restaurant I would probably take out the seeds get the water there's a rendering beautiful there's some nice and low and slow there you go what else goes into the salad we all do something well we'll make a vinaigrette it's a real do give a shout out here one thing I learned from Jack Pathan in person in fact was that he feels people don't take enough of the outer shell on the outer peels outer layers of shallots and onions off because those outer shells are sometimes a little dry and they could be a little more strongly flavored than you want so I have learned to start getting a little bit more generous with the amount of layers I take off of that shallot just a little rough there's not to be too precise that's probably enough for one salad I think what else well we got this pecorino happen as well just use some of it Internet and the salad as well there's nothing the dressing here a bit [Music] lemons from our backyard now what are we gonna do we're gonna do something slowly and whisking some olive oil it's probably not gonna be a super tight emulsion that's okay now the reason the reason an emulsion is important in the salad is because first of all it helps the it helps the vinegar or in this case the lemon juice you know whatever the acid is it helps it stick to the leaves so that it doesn't all just drain to the bottom of the bowl it also helps protect the leaves from the effects of the oil actually let me show you something here's um I've done this down with this this a demo of this in my book so here's - arugula is super fresh I'm gonna put a lot of people think it's the acid in a salad that that will cause the greens to go limp but it's not it's actually the oil so I'll show you I'm gonna put some acid on there lemon juice all over it okay just like that and then this other one I'm gonna take just a little bit of olive oil all over that one and now we'll just put these let's put these aside here and we'll come back to them in a few minutes and see what happens okay doing a little impromptu science alright that's all ready to go let's get our Tomatoes these ones are actual DOP Tomatoes San marzanos and our bucatini in the water oh this is that brand of pasta I was showing you the other day I didn't realize but it's actually just the UM it's its signature reserve it's the Safeway brand like their fancy brand and it's actually really good brass die extruded you can see the nice white texture you can see the texture on it I don't know if you can see but I can see the texture and I'm telling you it's there it's beautiful and that is what helps the pasta stick it's what creates the starch of your pasta water and helps the sauce stick excuse me it helps emulsify the sauce properly alright so we're gonna get that in the water here now some people just add black pepper the variant that's a little bit too much fat in there mother that's very fatty pancetta okay just drain a little bit of it off save that for another use toast a grilled cheese in it maybe maybe tonight maybe I'll maybe I'll put one of those videos tonight black pepper I'm gonna put like putting some in with the oil to kind of bloom it and get a little bit sweeter and infuse the oil with the flavor and then I'm also gonna have a little bit at the very end just for that kind of kind of fresh hitted feet I'm just a little bit of pepper flakes not a lot toast it up a little all right we got our San Marzano tomatoes you don't have to use same words on those but I am and again I'm gonna go in with this one of my favorite tools I use this you know this is great for if you're making like if you're browning sausage and you want to crumble it for a sauce or if you're you know when you're making ground meat chili or like you know American you know Mexican American style tex-mex tacos with like a ground beef filling this is really good this tool is really great for breaking up things that are simmering or sautéing in a pan don't use it in your nonstick because it will scratch it but against steel and the last enamel like this as long as you're kind of relatively gentle with it works real well move into salt all right now we're gonna let that simmer this is a sort of a quick pan sauce I'm some people I know Daniel day know grits are my colleague at serious eats on his recipe for this he doesn't assemble a but he's in the story for it he talks about how he worked at am a Tuscan restaurant in New York he was a sous chef there and they made their amateur channa sauce with onions and garlic and they cooked it down for a long time which is a very untraditional method but you know again with all these things you do it how you want you do what tastes good to you some people might complain that you know if you change you change the base recipe you are now changing you know you're changing it so you should no longer call it how much rachana I'm not really that much of a prescriptivists with language because I think you know the point of language is to communicate so if it makes it easier for someone to understand what you're making by saying I'm making how much with jonatha then you do that and you know maybe it depends on your audience like with a you know if you're talking to a an American audience they're probably gonna understand it better if you call it I'm a to China even if it's not traditional elementary China whereas if you're talking to a Roman audience they might get more confused if you start calling something I would reach an O and it's when it's not traditional at all you know so you know no you know your audience and and just relaxed about it all you know doesn't really matter too much oh you know what I said I would do I said I would go through comments and has to answer some questions next time oh can you explain why a hot white adding water to a hot pan would ruin it and a couple of my videos I'm kind of and I sometimes do this like I'll take a hot pan and I run it directly under cold water it's not a good idea because the shock the thermal shock can cause the pan to warp so if it's a thinner pan especially it'll cause it to warp or if it's a like a clad pan like a triply steel with the sandwich with aluminum or sandwich with copper try pet fly pans will tend to the layers can separate from each other because the metals expand and contract at different rates and especially if you pour cold water on a hot on a hot pan that outer layer of metal is gonna really quick rapidly contract and that can cause it to pull away from the inner layer of metal so generally you do want to let your pans cool relatively slowly rather than shocking them alright we got everything going here let's see what else can we add to our salad here we got we got my daughters if you're a parent of a toddler you probably see stuff like this around you got my daughter's half-eaten Apple so I'm gonna just trim off the bitten parts this is exactly how we would do it at the restaurant you know just kidding we would not do this at the restaurant different rules for home and work looks tasty let's get that in there what do we got we got maybe I don't have any nuts right now holy cow I might have used up all my nuts where's me nuts uh there's some hazelnuts how do they smell they don't smell fresh I got no nuts oh well we're not gonna do nuts in that case I'll leave those for something else to find I'll leave that for future candy to take care of I don't really like future candy use it it's a jerk all right house is going down how's our pasta looking just like with the cacio e pepe you want to make basically cook the pasta to a little bit shy of al dente so if the you know the box of pasta says it's gonna cook for 12 minutes you want to cook it for like 10 and then it's gonna finish off in the sauce you'll have some extra makes for cheese this knows it fit feta cheese I had been saving that feta cheese because I was gonna make spanakopita with Alisha good thing to do with kids folding dough and you know one of those things where it's gonna cope it does that you know that Greek dish of spinach and feta wrapped in phyllo dough and baked it's one of those dishes that even when it looks terrible like you know even if a little kids clumsy fingers do it or a grown person's clumsy fingers do it it still tastes good oh let's look at the arugula so the one that had lemon juice on it I don't know if you can see it but like no bruising really to speak of maybe a tiny bit worth it that looks like the leaf kind of folded and crushed themselves there but no real bruising or limping that you can see whereas the one with oil so you can see how the oil has started to kind of seep through into these spots like that and the reason that is is because well first of all the oil is the oil is what's going to make your leaves new your salad greens go limp the reason that is is because leaves grown out on the trees or grown out on the bushes they have a kind of waxy coating on them and that's there to protect them from rain you know because if it were acid acids the culinary acids that we use are mostly water right um so if if if if they didn't have that waxy coating every time it rained all the leaves would go limp and the trees would just fall down all the leaves would fall off and go limp so they have this waxy coating and that's what makes droplets of water kind of run off the leaf and it's also what makes droplets of vinegar or lemon juice run off the salad greens into the bottom of the bowl meanwhile oils can actually penetrate because they're you know they're all hydrophilic hydrophobic molecules today they can penetrate in the oils can actually get in there and penetrate between the cells and that's what makes them get that sort of translucent look and that's what makes them go really limp and that's also a make yeah but makes your salad greens not last that long so an emulsion helps both of those it helps the vinegar stay on the salts the acid stay on the leaf and it helps prevent the leaf from going limp as fast anyway you don't want to toss your salad till right before right before or you're ready to serve let's see how that pastas doing I think we're pretty much there with the pasta I'm looking close what we are there stance a little bit a little bit too much sauce I'm gonna take some of this out for that's about right for the amount of pasta we have it still works on that pinch up though pasta in let's bring it up to a simmer shut this off get a little bit of that pasta water in there now we are gonna go in with our cheese pecorino-romano has a really nice sort it's a sheep's milk cheese aged a really nice kind of sharp well acidic a little bit kind of peppery flavor and it's you know it is the classic flavor of Rome of these Roman pasta dishes but of course if you can't find it or you prefer the flavor of parmesan you can definitely go with just some parmesan a little bit of fresh black pepper gonna try and keep it relatively coarse this time you can also do it in a mortar and pestle if you really want that coarseness which sometimes I do olive oil some fresh olive oil at the end all right you can see how the sauce really nicely kind of coats the pasta you know it's very different from like what you'd see like in I don't know like in your high school cafeteria where you get the the oil boiled pasta a pile of oil pasta in your bowl and then a ladle of sauce on the top and you end up kind of eating plain pasta and plain sauce and it doesn't really it doesn't achieve what I think ed Levine would call cosmic oneness you want that pasta and the sauce to achieve cosmic oneness and let's get a little bit of extra sauce on there a little bit of that extra sauce around at least get the chunky Santa [Music] just touch you don't have to it's just it's just like in a restaurant have it cleaned up the edge of the plate and little more makeup you know little more black pepper all right we got that let's toss our salad at least here a lunch in like three minutes all right do you missus [Music] Musti what bite of that pasta before uh before I give any of it to Elise yeah what do you think I think it looks pretty good this is a pretty good-looking lunch hmm one of the nice things about finishing pasta in the sauce like this the size from sort of getting the flavor to really coated is that um it goes into what well what again my colleague Daniel Richard calls pasta bullet time which is where the pasta that because you're cooking it in an acidic sauce and acid actually slows down the rate of water absorption and so the pasta takes longer you have a longer of window want longer window of time before it passes through that you know that al dente phase and starts to turn mushy so it makes it a little bit more forgiving to finish in the sauce and of course it makes it more flavorful that is excellent if I do say so myself all right thank you we're gonna have lunch spike

Channel: J. Kenji López-Alt

Views: 292,331

Rating: 4.9483705 out of 5

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Id: 0SxlESaak_Q

Length: 23min 29sec (1409 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 05 2020