Name: Tomato spaghetti
Prep time: 10 min
Cook time: 50 min
Yield: 4 Servings
Cuisine: Italian
Ingredients: Spaghetti pasta: 320g; Olive oil: 30g; Basil: 4 leaves; Italian peeled tomatoes: 2 cans (400g ca. each); Garlic: 1 clove; Salt: 1 pinch

Italian tomato spaghetti, the queen of italian recipes. Let's get started with this simple but delicious meal!

Features:

Cuisine:

Italian

Ingredients

320g Spaghetti pasta
30g Olive oil
4 leaves Basil
2 cans (400g ca. each) Italian peeled tomatoes
1 clove Garlic
1 pinch Salt

Directions

Hello everyone and welcome to the very first recipe of Cerere Food blog. I decided to start with something simple but very very common in Italian diet. Tomato spaghetti is a very basic plate among all of the italian recipes and it represents your baptism of fire in the Italian food world.

First of all, one basic lesson: How to cook pasta correctly.

If you buy a pack of original Italian pasta you will notice that is clearly indicated how many minutes it has to cook (in boiling salty water): usually around 10/12 minutes for dried pasta and 2/3 minutes for fresh/egg pasta. So, do not overcook pasta. This seems a very easy step but, trust me, it’s not. So, after you decided how much pasta you will cook, take a pot of the right size and put water and ½ tbsp of salt into it. Water should be enough to fully pour all the pasta you have to cook. So, don’t be a Scrooge when it comes to put water to boil. Then wait until it starts to bubble constantly, finally you can pour your pasta in and wait for it to cook.

It has to be “AL DENTE”, it means it’s cooked, but it’s in the middle between raw and overcooked, it means just perfection. Probably it derives from the ancient way to indicate the right cook timing for pasta, because only people with teeth (“denti” in Italian) could eat it. Don’t worry, you will be a master in pasta cooking with practice!

Just DO NOT pour pasta in cold water, and DO NOT leave pasta overcook, otherwise the result will be a carpenter product and not food anymore!

By the way, now let’s focus on the queen of Italian recipes in the world, tomato spaghetti!

The recipe is divided in two simple parts, as the name suggests: pasta and tomato. Let’s start with tomato.

Steps

1 Done	Take a large pan (it will contain all the pasta and tomato in the end of the recipe so be sure it is large enough to contain everything) and pour 4 tbsp of oil (generally 1 tbsp each serve), and put it on the stove with the clove of garlic. Cook it until the clove becomes golden, but be careful: it burns veeery easily!! After that, you can add Italian peeled tomatoes to the pan, adding a pinch of salt. Cover with a lid and let cook slow for 30 to 60 minutes, depending on your personal tastes. Here it is another Italian kitchen secret: taste what you cook. For someone, a pinch of salt can make the dish too salty, for someone else it could be bland, for someone your “sugo” (tomato sauce in Italian) could be too raw, for someone else it is overcooked and you can’t describe it just with your sight, so… pick a spoon and taste what you cook! When your sauce is bubbling gently (and constantly), it’s time to stop cooking it. Take it off the stove a let it rest.
2 Done	Now you can cook the pasta! Take a large pot and fill it with water (around ¾ of the pot). Add ½ tbsp of salt (pasta must be cooked always in salty water!) and put it on the stove. Wait until water starts to bubble intensely (it means it will transfer only heat to the pasta, and not also water, so it won’t be slimy). Now you can pour the spaghetti. Do not worry if they aren’t completely into the water! You can help yourself with a fork after just two/three seconds and stir the spaghetti: there is no need to break them! Read carefully on the pasta package the amount of time it should cook, then I recommend to use a timer (Siri is your friend, but also Google is fit for this). Set the timer 1 minute before the number indicated on the package: so if it says 10 minutes, set the timer to 9 minutes. This is very important because pasta keep cooking even after you remove it from boiling water, and then you’ll have to add it in the hot sauce, this means it will keep cooking for another minute in the meanwhile! When the timer says 2/3 minutes left, put the sauce on the stove, and warm it slowly. Add basil (remember not to use a knife with it or, at least, if you don’t like it whole, use your hands to chop it! The knife will make the basil bitter and without flavor).
3 Done	Now, when the timer is over, drain the pasta, and quickly pour it into the sauce, stir constantly and gently. When the result is homogeneous (it means you mustn’t see white pasta without sauce), you can take the pot off the stove. Please note: this part mustn’t last more than 1 minute, or the pasta will be overcooked. It’s time to eat the queen of Italian recipes. Your tomato spaghetti is ready to be served! You can also add more basil leaves into the plates as decoration. Notes: - You can add grated Italian parmesan on the top of the plate, if you like it! - One of the most common variants is the one with half Italian peeled tomatoes (400g) and half Italian tomatoes passata (400/500g). The italian recipe for tomato spaghetti is pretty the same, just add passata after you put Italian peeled tomatoes in the oil! The result of this variant is more velvety and thick.