March 2025
Recipe from Cook's Illustrated, September 2024
I have a vague memory of once making penne alla vodka. There are several America's Test Kitchen recipes for this dish backing up this memory. However, I could not find an entry for it in this blog so I have nothing in writing to jog my memory of the effort. A recent issue of Cook's Illustrated brought this to mind with a new recipe. It looked appealing so I gave it a go.
The pasta (rigatoni) and sauce are prepared separately then brought together in the last step of the recipe. The only modificationI made to the ingredients was a nod to our dislike of spicy food, using half the red pepper flakes, just ⅛ teaspoon. After preparing the ingredients, chopped pancetta and red pepper flakes were cooked in a Dutch oven. Minced garlic was added and cooked followed by tomato paste. Vodka was added to the mixture and cooked until most of the liquid was gone. (I did not remove the Dutch oven from the heat, as described in the recipe, as I was using an electric stove with no open flame.) Passata (an uncooked tomato puree found at the supermarket), cream, salt, and pepper were stirred in and simmered about 10 minutes. A little more vodka was stirred into the sauce then the cooked rigatoni was mixed in along with a small amount of pasta cooking water to adjust the consistency. The pasta was served with grated Parmesan cheese. Total time was about one hour; this could have been reduced some by cooking the pasta sooner.
This is a good dish, pretty easy to make and taking only an hour. We should get at least four meals from this preparation. It was not spicy and so could have been okay with the full ¼ teaspoon of red pepper flakes. The sauce is velvety, it adheres well to the pasta, and the acidic nature of the tomatoes is muted by the cream. It was good as a leftover, reheated in the microwave, though perhaps a little dry. According to the recipe the vodka enhances the flavors of the other ingredients without adding any flavor of its own.
