Welcome to my new series…Cooking Through the Alphabet! I’ll bring you a recipe for each letter of the alphabet, either with ingredients or some kind of descriptor. Enjoy!
Through Tik Tok, I learned about Carbone, an Italian restaurant in New York City with a cult like following. Apparently, they have an excellent spicy rigatoni pasta dish that draws in crowds from around the world. I had to have it.
Well, with Covid, I’m not getting there anytime soon (it seems like I wouldn’t get there without a reservation anytime soon even without a pandemic), so I wanted to try my hand at creating it. I want to preface this that I have never had Carbone, so I absolutely have no idea how this compares! What I do know is this is a delicious and relatively easy dish to make!
Ingredients:
- Half a Box of Rigatoni Pasta
- 1 Chopped Yellow Onion
- 1 Minced Garlic Clove
- 1 tbsp Butter
- 6 oz Tomato Paste (one can)
- 2 tbsp Trader Joes Italian Bomba Sauce (has Calabrian Chilis in it…aka the secret ingredient)
- 1 Big Old Splash Vodka
- 3/4 cup Heavy Cream
- Salt and Pepper
Steps:
- Simmer and caramelize butter, onion, garlic, salt, and pepper for about 20 to 30 minutes. You want it soft and golden with lots of flavor.
- Cook your pasta in heavily salted water until it is al dente as per box instructions.
- To the onion mixture, add your tomato paste, chili sauce, cream, and vodka. Stir it together until smooth and let cook for about 15 minutes.
- Drain the pasta and reserve a bit of the water. Add the pasta to the sauce, stir, and add pasta water as desired to thin the sauce out.
- Top with parmesan cheese if you have!
So, will you make this pasta? It’s super quick, and I thought it tasted delicious. A lot of my reading said that the Calabrian chili pasta was the secret to the sauce, and while I couldn’t find that, this fermented chili joy from Trader Joes gave great flavor and kick!
All thoughts and opinions are my own.