Caprese Pasta - My Number One
A dreamy, creamy, steamy pasta that tastes just as impressive as it looks.
Ah Caprese salad. Mozzarella. Rocket. Tomatoes. Balsamic. All of the good things in life.
Any time I ever go to an Italian restaurant, I pray on the journey there that I'm going to see a Caprese on the starter menu - my issue is that my eyes are way bigger than my stomach, and I always decide on a Caprese, a bowl of pasta, a chicken based main, and a dessert.
You've probably all been where I am after an Italian meal (or not, because you might have control over your gluttony) but my other half has to wheel me out of there, jeans undone, tummy bloating uncontrollably, and all the romance of our Italian date ruined when I have to take a 2 hour food coma nap when we get home just to have a chance of surviving.
So the idea of mixing a Caprese Salad with pasta was something that I wasn't 100% sure on, but it combines my two favourite courses of an Italian, so I thought it was worth a try.
I cook every night for Mrs Scran Man and I, and I know she's a sucker for a good bowl of pasta. She'd drown in pasta sauce if she could. When I told her I was making a Caprese Pasta, she screwed her nose up in a sign of distaste, but she was willing to try.
A side note about Mrs SM; she's a lifelong vegetarian who - up until meeting me 5 years ago - used to eat nothing but plain Quorn chicken wraps, and Birdseye potato waffles with garlic sauce. She's a picky eater, and she's nervous about trying new things. Slowly but surely though we're getting there, and this pasta is now one of her favourite things to have for tea; she even had me cook it for her mother when she visited a few weeks ago - it went down a hit!
Anyway, less of my personal life. You're not here to read about my picky eater of a girlfriend; you're here for a pasta recipe. Let's get into it.
Ingredients (Cooking for 2)
- 1 Brown Onion
- 2 Cloves of Garlic
- 200g Rigatoni Pasta
- Tomato Puree
- 1 Veggie Stock cube/pot
- 1 Tin of Chopped Tomatoes
- 1 Punnett of Cherry Tomatoes
- 1 Ball of Mozzarella
- Balsamic Vinegar
- A Bunch of Chives
- Pine Nuts (Optional)
Recipe
STEP ONE -
First things first, get a pan of salted water on the boil so that it can simmer away nicely while we're busy prepping.
In a habit learned from my mother, my method in the kitchen is always to have everything chopped, crushed, mixed etc before I start any of my actual cooking. The best thing I ever purchased were some tiny bowls for my ingredients. I get everything prepped, weighed and shared out into bowls, and then I clean up the mess from the prep - only then do I start heating things up.
There's a fair amount of chopping in this one, so let's get started.
Get your brown onion and peel, halve, and finely chop. You can choose your chopping method (diced, sliced, etc) down to personal preference, but I always choose to thinly slice - and I mean thin. When you've finished with the onion, it should look like you've chopped 2 sets rather than one. The onion is going to be used as a base in our sauce, and unless you like a chunky sauce, you need to make sure these are skinnier than a catwalk model from 2006.
Next up, peel your two garlic cloves and get them grated. If you have a garlic press, wonderful, use it! If not - don't worry. I don't have one myself; instead I use the fine side of my cheese grater, and then wipe off the minced up garlic with a knife to plate up for when I need it. You then need to take out all of the cherry tomatoes and halve them. After that, get your bunch of chives chopped up, as large or small as you like them.
STEP TWO
Let's do a quick checklist, shall we? So by this point, you should have:
- your thin bits of onion
- your grated up garlic
- a bunch of chopped up chives
- a bowl of halved cherry tomatoes
From here, I usually put a pinch of salt and pepper on the tomatoes with a little olive oil and mix it all together, just so it can soak in some of the seasoning throughout our cooking, but that's completely up to you and personal taste preference.
Remember that water we put on the boil? That should be rolling away nicely now, so get your Rigatoni poured into there. The packs usually state ~12 minutes for Rigatoni to cook, but I usually estimate it to be more around 15 minutes if you want the pasta nice and soft.
On another hob, it's time to get the frying pan out. Now at this point, if you're planning on garnishing your dish with some pine nuts, now is the time to get some toasted. Get your hob turned to medium heat, and leave the pan on there for a few minutes to get nice and hot - you don't need oil for this as it will either make the pine nuts soggy, or cause them to burn before they get a chance to toast. Once the pan is hot, throw about half a bag of the pine nuts on there and let them toast. This should 100% take no longer than 2-3 minutes, and you need to stay with them, move them around the pan, and watch them like your life depends on it. They can go from toasted to burnt in 0.2 seconds. Once they have a nice light brown colour to them, transfer them out of the pan into a little bowl or plate to cool down.
One your frying pan is empty again, add a swig of olive oil on there and get it back onto the medium heat. Remember to give that pasta on the other hob a stir every now and then while you're in the process of making this sauce.
STEP THREE
It's sauce tiiiiiiiiime. Get that finely cut bowl of onions from earlier, and get it thrown onto your hot oily frying pan. It should make that lovely sizzle sound as soon as it hits the surface. Because these onions are so thin, it should take no longer than 5 minutes for them to get nice and soft. During this five minutes, move the onions around the pan, turning them over and stirring them together. When they're ready, they should be slightly congealed, and if you're cooking for someone, this should be the point they tell you the food smells great (who doesn't like the smell of cooking onions).
You can now add the minced garlic to the pan with the onions in, and add a healthy squeeze of tomato puree. I don't have a specific measurement for the amount of tomato puree that needs to go into this pasta unfortunately, as it's really more a personal preference/eyeballing technique. I would say I put just under a quarter of a standard sized tube of puree in there, but it all depends on the kind of sauce you're looking for. If you want a really rich and thick sauce, you might need slightly more puree, whereas if you're looking for a thinner more subtle sauce, slightly less.
The pan will be really hot by this point, so it'll start screaming at you as soon as you drop the puree and garlic in there. Just make sure you move the food about constantly, stirring around the pan; don't let anything sit still, or it might catch and burn. You only need to do this for about a minute, since both of the added ingredients are already soft. When it's ready, the onion garlic and puree should all be melded together in one big slop pile - appetising I know, but it's what we need.
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| The onion, garlic and puree slop. |
STEP FOUR
Back to the frying pan. Get it back onto the hot hob, and pour in the full tin of chopped tomatoes you should have amongst your ingredients. Give it a really good stir for a minute or two over the heat, make sure you can see and feel your onion, garlic and puree mixing into the chopped tomatoes. The chopped tomatoes should be becoming slightly thicker, and have more of a pasta sauce feel to it. You can then drop in your stock cube/pot, still over the heat, and give it another good mix together. This will change the colour of the sauce once it's mixed in properly, and give it more of an earthy smell rather than overwhelmingly tomato.
It's time to let the sauce simmer for about 10 minutes now, to let it thicken up and reduce into a proper pasta sauce. If you have any, I would recommend adding a little pinch of sugar into the sauce at this point, as I find it nicely balances out the tartness of all the tomato.
Let the sauce bubble away, stirring occasionally to stop any catching and burning, and move on to preparing our garnish while it reduces.
STEP FIVE
You're probably thinking to yourself at this point, "Scran Man; what the hell makes this a caprese pasta?" Well now, this is what you've been waiting for.
While our sauce reduces (again, please remember to keep giving it a little stir every now and then) it's time for us to get stuck into those fresh ingredients we had left on the table.
Get hold of the mozzarella, and get the water it sits in poured out into the sink. Pat dry the ball with some kitchen roll, and begin the process of pulling it apart into chunks. You could chop the mozzarella up with a knife if you'd prefer, but I find pulling it apart with your fingers gives it a more rustic, authentic look in the final product. You can choose how big or small you want the chunks to be, but once it's pulled apart, split the chunks into 2 piles.
Next up, get that bowl of tomatoes you had halved, and mix it with half of your pile of chopped chives. Add a swig of balsamic, as much or as little as you like, and give it all another mix around. Put the bowl back onto the side, and let the flavour sink into the tomatoes.
STEP SIX
So after 10 minutes or so, your sauce should be nice and thick, and when you take a scoop of it with your spoon, it should coat the back nicely. Now is the time to throw some seasoning in there to your own personal taste. Whack in some salt and pepper, and make sure you have a little taste of the sauce to make sure it works for you.
When you've balanced the seasoning the way you like, add the drained pasta from earlier into the pan with all the sauce - still on the heat - and stir all of the pasta through until it's all nicely and evenly coated in the sauce. Once all of the pasta is coated, take the remaining half of your chopped chives and sprinkle them over the pasta in the pan, stirring it through to make sure the chives are distributed throughout.
You then need to take one pile of the pulled apart mozzarella (remember, we separated them into 2 half piles earlier) and add piece by piece into the pasta, stirring between each addition, until the mozzarella has melted within the sauce. You should get that gorgeous cheese pull while you stir.
After that, it's time to get plated up. Share the pasta into bowls, making sure you wipe up any stray splashes of sauce around the sides of the plate.
This is where we make the dish pretty. Grab that bowl of balsamic tomatoes, and evenly split it between the two bowls of pasta. Spoon the tomatoes on top like a garnish - you can use the picture of my finished product as a guide if you need - and then spread over the remaining fresh, uncooked mozzarella between the tomatoes. If you're using them, spread your toasted pine nuts over the top of everything on the dish, and hey presto - you've got yourself a cracking looking dish. Before I serve the food, I add an extra swig of balsamic in streaks over the top of the pasta, but that's completely up to you - I would drown in balsamic if given the chance.
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| The Finished Product |
I'll be back again in a few days with a homemade guac and poached eggs recipe - simple and effective!
Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoy the food!
The Scran Man x
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