Orange cherry tomato pasta
There’s something really beautiful about making an adult tomato pasta. While this is pasta with tomato sauce, it’s not that simple. There’s pancetta, chilli flakes, chicken bone broth, pecorino and exclusively yellow cherry tomatoes. It’s deep in flavor with a hint of hot, spicy honey and balanced in acidity with tomatoes. It’s paired perfectly with a glass of orange wine!
It’s the kind of pasta I make on sunday afternoons while I play my ‘main character in a cooking film’ playlist (you can find here on Spotify).
Yes, it’s a tomato sauce pasta, but it’s so much more than that.
Makes two servings.
Ingredients:
1 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
50g pancetta, diced
4 garlic cloves, roughly chopped
2 shallots, sliced
1 parsley sprig, stem and leaves in tact, (optional, only if you already have parsley at home)
1/2 tsp chilli flakes
350g orange cherry tomatoes, sun gold or other variety
250ml, or 1 cup, chicken bone broth, or stock - reduced sodium
1/2 tsp honey, heaped
pinch of salt and fresh cracked black pepper
200g rigatoni, or pasta shape of choice!
1 tbsp butter, unsalted
1/2 cup pecorino, grated
Method:
Render the pancetta: Bring a large fry pan to low heat. Add 1 tbsp olive oil and diced pancetta to the pan. Saute as the pancetta sizzles and releases it’s fat as oil into the pan. After 5-8 minutes, remove the pancetta from the pan once it’s golden on all sides and transfer to a small bowl. Leave behind the oil in the pan and leave the heat on.
Start the sauce: in the same pan with oil, add shallots and garlic. Increase the heat from low to medium-low. Add parsley sprig and saute for 3-5 minutes, or until garlic is lightly golden. Add chilli flakes and tomatoes. Saute for 2-3 minutes more. Add chicken bone broth, honey, salt and pepper and discard the parsley sprig. Simmer for 15 minutes on medium-low heat. Once tomatoes have mostly broken down, turn off from heat and let cool slightly.
Blend the sauce: add tomatoes to a blender and blend on high speed until creamy and everything is perfectly blended.
If you have a blender with an opening on the top, loosely cover it with a tea towel while you blend so the hot air can escape and the sauce won’t splatter everywhere. If your blender doesn't have an opening for hot air to escape while it blends, wait for the tomatoes to completely cool - otherwise it can be very dangerous for you to blend hot liquid in a blender!
Cook the pasta: bring a pot of water to a rapid boil, heavily salt the water and cook pasta until al dente.
Combine pasta with sauce: add blended pasta sauce back into the same pan and bring to medium heat. Once pasta is al dente, use a ladle to add pasta into the sauce with some of the pasta water dripping into the pan, about 1/4 cup total of pasta water. Add butter and handfuls of pecorino at a time as you mix vigourously. Leave a little bit of pecorino for garnish :) Once the pasta sauce has thickened and is glossy and beautiful, remove from heat and serve with extra pecorino on top. Enjoy!!!
