Pandemic Sauce Spaghetti

I mentioned this video on Facebook but I just realized I forgot to slog about it:



Friend-of-the-Slog Paul Trapani created this "Pandemic Sauce" video to serve a very specific need: his friends were complaining last spring about how supermarkets were all out of spaghetti sauce due to pandemic hoarding.

As a Sicilian, this drove Paul a little batty, because tomato sauce is so easy to make yourself. So as a health emergency public service, he offered this video to show people how easy it is.

Of course, 90% of the value is in the bad things Paul staunchly does NOT do. Avoiding mistakes is the little-examined dark matter in a world where everyone pursues Slick Moves ($300 copper pots! The entire inventory of Williams Sonoma! Etc.!) rather than the expungement of Dumb Blunders. Nobody wants to expunge blunders because that would make them feel like blunderers. Once again, humans would rather feel smart than be smart, and feeling smart requires ignoring, at all costs, your stupidity.

Paul admirably sidestepped the expected Italian logic outcome where in trying to demonstrate an easy thing, loads of unnecessary complexity get piled on because only a stronzo would take a basic approach.

This is the most stripped-down sauce imaginable. And, if you do it right, it's good - while supermarket sauce is very very not good. There is something to be said for easy step-ups.

I've made spaghetti sauces an order of magnitude or two more ambitious. They took much time and fuss, and, honestly, were well worth it, because the end results were far more refined and nuanced. But, despite what snobs say, "refined and nuanced" isn't superior. Simplicity absolutely has its uses. I'd much prefer an excellent simple sauce to a pretty good refined one. In fact, I wouldn't necessarily prefer an excellent refined one to an excellent simple one. It depends on the context, and what I'm in the mood for. Every snobbish heirarchy stems from misconstruing wonderfully diverse horizontal options with shame-provoked vertical aspirations.

Anyway, here's my latest effort (it's way better if you click to expand the photo):

Having made a slew of Paul's pandemic sauce, I'm beginning to inject small iterative tweaks:

1. I simplified the procedure still more by crushing tomatoes (with the potato masher!) right in the pot with the garlic. That's one less bowl to wash!

2. For the first time, I added ground parmesan cheese.

I'm not a fan of the Nebraska Sprinkle - the shaggy white mound atop the sauce atop the spaghetti that screams "That's Italian!!!" to gringos. Cheese, like secret agents, does its best work quietly burrowed deep inside the enterprise. So I grated up a half cup, and, after draining the spaghetti, I returned the pasta to its cooking pot and savagely stirred in the cheese, as if I were making a cacio e pepe, along with a whole bunch of grated black pepper (I've been experimenting with potent Tellicherry Indian black peppercorns, and while there are a lot of contexts - e.g. in combination with onions - where I still rely on The Seasoning of My People - 10-year old Durkees pepper stored over-the-stove - I'm digging this stuff for pasta). Then, after the violent alloying of pasta, cheese, and pepper into a new Higher Substance, I delicately, oh-so-lightly, stirred in (still in the cooking pot) pandemic sauce. I didn't spoon it atop plated pasta because I don't like the inevitable uncoated strands from the watery borderlands, but I didn't over-stir because I also dislike the school lunchroom effect where sauce has been completely worked-in, leaving the pasta ketchup-red and every bite offering the same sauce-to-pasta ratio.

I offered this cooking tip on Twitter last week:

Every time you cook something, criticize it like it’s a restaurant. And next time, make tiny adjustments to ensure it comes closer to your pref. Think Grand Canyon: macro progress via cumulative myriad micro-iterations.

...and that's exactly what the above moves were about. I don't like the Nebraska Sprinkle or Lunchroom Effect Saucing. And it's my kitchen and my pasta, so I'm absolutely free to coddle my preferences. You can get very far as a cook by simply making your preferences conscious and gradually but persistently aiming to coddle them...even if your efforts are blindly feeble (with sufficient iterations, anything's possible, so long as you never stop trying).

3. I used really fancy expensive spaghetti (Rustichella, which is produced painstakingly in some bronze thingee or whatever).

Why? Look, I've had a slight aversion to choosing spaghetti as a pasta shape to cook for various reasons. I'm now all-in, so I'm helping myself over the hump via The Best I Can Buy. It's inevitable that I'll downshift to De Cecco. But for now, I up-pay for the psychological support.