Pasta All'Amatriciana | Where Cooking Begins

hey guys it's karla i'm here again in my kitchen for a new episode of where cooking begins my first book and the recipe i'm making today is pasta ala machachana which is one of the classic pastas of rome i left this one out when i was talking about the classic pastas of rome in a different video it was just an accident and a pretty silly one considering i actually myself had a recipe for this dish i'm going to take you through it there's a couple moments that are really important to the dish i'm going to make sure to point those out so that you can get amazing results at home maya matrachana is going to have all of the flavors and ingredients that you would expect to see the pork the tomato the onion a little bit of cheese chili flake but the place where i take a little bit of twist on the matcha chana classic version is with the tomato so instead of just using canned tomatoes i'm going to use canned comfy tomatoes and the reason that i did that is because where cooking begins had a whole front section that was all about different cooking techniques since those were included in the book that became part of my matrachana if you want to skip this part you 100 can just use regular canned tomatoes and we'll add a little bit of olive oil later but this is a really nice way to make canned tomatoes like even more delicious than they are and once they've been confeed they stay in the fridge indefinitely so what comfy means is to cook like submerged in fat and it was a preservation method because if you cook something submerged in oil then you basically create an anaerobic like no oxygen environment and oxygen is what makes food spoil so once it was cooked in the oil you could store it covered in that and you know this is like people didn't have refrigerators you don't have to use meat and you don't have to use animal fat and that's what this whole comfy section in the book was about with olive oil salt pepper and some optional aromatics you can make a really beautiful coffee out of anything so i'm adding enough extra virgin olive oil just to kind of come to the top and again being true to myself i'm drizzling a lot of olive oil [Music] it's like my favorite thing to do in videos so i'm going to stop right there the olive oil is just kind of just kissing the very top of the tomatoes as they cook they're going to collapse a little bit and shrink down and then the oil will be absolutely submerging them i think this is also delicious with some thyme rosemary sage marjoram could even be basil some smashed garlic because why wouldn't we tomato and garlic best friends forever and i also like to do a little bit of lemon zest so just squeeze those to express the lemon oil and do like just a couple fat strips tomato and garlic as everyone knows became best friends in italy because garlic was there first and then tomato came along and then they decided they would just be in marinara's together and on pizzas together and they're hardcore polyamorous because they really shine when other people come to the party so when basil comes over it's like oh my god basil's here when olive oil and salt get involved in tomato and garlic it gets crazy mozzarella has been known um to kind of slide into the dms if you know what i mean i have gorgeous tomatoes so what's gonna happen when this is in the oven is that all of the flavors are gonna marry so the olive oil is gonna coax out all the flavor from the thyme and from the lemon and the garlic because those things infuse into fat those flavors are going to carry into the flesh of the tomato and then the tomato is going to like give its juice back to the other liquid and then that liquid is going to go back into the tomato and then by the end yeah they're in a commune together and it's a beautiful place where no one thing could exist without the other send them on their journey okay so it's been about three hours the tomatoes have been doing their thing creating an intentional community with their friends and they look exactly how i want them to look so i don't actually need these until i start making the sauce so the remaining sauce ingredients are very few and very simple probably one of the more important ones is this cured pork product called guanchale if you've heard of pancetta guanchali is very similar it is um spiced and cured but instead of coming from the belly which is where pancetta comes from guanciale comes from the jowl so it's like the fatty cheek of the piggy if you can't find guanciale which i could not find in my college years which is when i first started cooking a matrachana you can use bacon it's wrong but sometimes what's wrong is right it's what's right for you bacon is smoked guanchali and pancetta are not they're spiced and cured bacon is spiced smoked and cured so that's really the difference you're going to be adding like a a smoky flavor if you use bacon but you know they did not have guanciale in my college town there's a lot of fat which is important fat is flavor we've talked about this it's going to infuse into the sauce it's going to become a cooking medium what i don't want is this outer kind of concentrated layer where the spices have been because if you cook those spices when you cook the fat it's going to get kind of bitter so i'm going to trim that off all the way around all right so the amount of guanciale that i need is four ounces oh my god it's 3.8 ounces that is an actual miracle i want them in pretty nice chunky pieces because they're going to shrink when we render them and when they shrink i don't want them to disappear and i don't want them to be bitsy i want them to be something that you can sink your teeth into because you want its deliciousness and the experience the best way to cook these is to start them in a cold pan so i'm putting them straight into the dutch oven where i'm going to make the sauce i'm using a red onion which is also very classic to the original or original to the classic when you give something a name like pasta ala matrachana and it's like from amatrice it seems intimidating and intense but essentially what we're dealing with with italian pastas this is a pantry sauce onion canned tomatoes a pork product your noodles olive oil you could make this any old time and i think that's why i cooked it so much in college you could just buy that stuff and have it in the house and they were really inexpensive and it was filling and it was good my onion's ready my guanciale is in the pot my tomatoes are standing by it's time to make the sauce nuts [Music] i've got a tall pot of water already coming up to a boil and i just put the guanciale in the cold pan over medium-low heat this is the best way to render a fatty cut of meat like this if you start in a cold pan it gives the fat sort of an opportunity to warm up and to liquefy before you start doing any searing or browning what i don't want is to have crispy pieces of guanchale that have a ton of fat still attached to them and i also don't want to have really crispy bits of guanciale that have no fat to them or where all the fat has rendered out that whole process is going to take about six eight minutes depending on your medium low this is about a midway point i would say i can see that fat is starting to collect in the bottom of the pan the pieces are shriveling a little bit and when i turn them there's just the barest lightest bit of golden and some kind of texture revealing in the surface whereas at the beginning that fat was just totally smooth all right everyone we have arrived at a key moment the guanchale are now lightly golden brown they've given up about half of their fat and they're equal parts crispy and chewy this is what you're looking for now that the guangchale are equal parts crispy chewy i have a nice amount of rendered fat in the bottom of the pan i'm going to take these out if i left them in here the entire time they would keep rendering their fat and they would lose the little crispiness that we've built up they're going to join in later and i'm just going to set those guys aside to the fat that has rendered from the guanciale i'm going to add some of the beautiful tomato confit oil as well if you did not make the tomato comfy which is totally fine just use regular olive oil for this step so just eyeballing two tablespoons the onions are going into this this is the fat that the onions are going to caramelize in the heat is still over low from rendering the guanciale i'm going to turn that up to medium and the goal here similarly is to eat all of the moisture and the juiciness out of these onions if you rush this first step you're going to get kind of fried crispy still sharp tasting browned onions and that's not what i want i want an onion that has given up all of its sweetness and then has turned the corner into caramelization that only happens if you give this first step a minute i'm going to hit them with a little bit of salt and pepper the salt will actually help draw out the moisture and it's going to season it from the get-go softening and sweating out the onions is going to take about four to six minutes until they're translucent soft floppy and ready for the next step and we have arrived at another key moment my onions have been going for sevenish minutes they've shrunken they've been juicy and now look at the way they flop they're flopping they're translucent except for that they're red they're really wiggly and jiggly they don't have any of that crunchy scaffolding left to them and they just are ready to dissolve i know this seems like a simple thing and it really is a simple thing it's these little things capturing these moments giving things time that are going to make you a great and super confident cook now that we have arrived at translucent floppy soft and sweet i can increase the heat to medium and coax out the caramelization and in the meantime i will prep some of these tomatoes and i like to just tear these up with my hand get something kind of rustic uneven some pieces are bigger some pieces are smaller that's part of the beauty you can see how like gloriously luscious and tender these guys are and they're going to have a ton of flavor as well gorgeous my onions are looking fantastic they have gone from translucent and saggy to brown and starting to appear crispy and this just adds another dimension to the flavor of the onion because caramelization brings also a little bit of bitterness so you're getting the sweetness now being tempered by the caramelization which is fantastic and i've got my torn tomatoes and i'm gonna add them directly to this pot i'm gonna season the tomatoes with a little salt and crushed red pepper this is very typical and important to the dish that there is a little bit of kick and spiciness to the matrachana if you don't like spicy food you can do whatever you want in your own house and i want these tomatoes to cook until they also reduce down get a little bit jammy and start to caramelize around the edge that's going to take three or four minutes and in the meantime i can start cooking the pasta so very typical shapes for a matrachana would be buccatini or rigatoni i really love this shape which is a long version of fusilli so it's like a really awesome telephone cord back when phones had telephone cords spiral and they're super long you can use any shape that you'd like my house my book i went with these okay as usual the pasta is gonna finish in the sauce in order to do that i need to undercook the pasta by a few minutes so i am setting a timer for three minutes less than what it says on the package that should give you a nice window to make sure that your pasta isn't overdone i see gorgeous caramelized jammy tomatoes in an absolutely extravagant and luscious caramelized onion mixture well what do you know it is time for another key moment my pasta is very very al dente i don't think in this country north america we have the cajones to undercook pasta to the level that the italians do but you have to when you're making this dish i want you to taste it there's her crunch here so i'm getting tactile feedback but i think i'm going to take a closer look what you want to see in the center of your pasta is a white core that's the uncooked inner sanctum which is so al dente that it is still a brighter weight we have perfectly very al dente pasta i'm putting this back over low heat to warm back up and then i'm going to take the pasta directly into here there's definitely some water still clinging to the noodles guanchale rejoins the party and to this i'm going to add a couple ladle fulls of pasta cooking liquid the action of tossing everything together is going to get the delicious cooking fat and the sauciness from the tomatoes to become a beautiful emulsified glossy sauce and that is now what i'm seeing at the bottom of the pot and it's starting to look creamy and rich and this is why we undercook our pasta because if it was perfect when it came out of the water it would be overcooked now because this dish can be made with ingredients that you might even have at home it is the kind of pasta that i really crave when we get home from a trip and get back to the house and i don't want to go to bed without dinner in rome they would eat this dish late at night it's warming it's got a little bit of kick but it's easy to make it's very comforting don't forget the cheese oh my god if you come over to my house just do me a favor taste the pasta before you put salt and pepper on it i hate it when people salt before they taste because maybe it didn't eat it [Music] when you bite into a nugget of fat something so exquisite is happening it's just kind of ethereal and magic it really transports you it's a matrochana classic for a reason you

Channel: Carla Lalli Music

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Keywords: pasta all'amatriciana, carla lalli music, roman pasta recipes, carla music, carla lalli, that sounds so good, where cooking begins, carla recipe, carla ba, carla bon appetit, bon appetit carla, carla lalli music bon appetit, bon appetit, amatriciana pasta, amatriciana recipe, amatriciana recipe authentic, carla lalli music pasta, carla lalli music recipe, carla pasta, carla matriciana recipe

Id: GvJTmOAPGAM

Length: 17min 20sec (1040 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 27 2022