Pasta is my kryptonite. Pasta, butter, and cheese could sustain me any day of the year. Freshly rolled or dried, I don’t care. I love it all. One of my all time favorite types of pasta is bucatini. It’s like a hollow spaghetti noodle and it provides a tiny tube for more sauce to burrow.
Bucatini is great for making any kind of saucy pasta, but a really good one is macaroni and cheese because it very closely resembles the noodles out of the Kraft blue box when you break up the long noodles into inch-long pieces, and the cheese sauce finds its way into the hollow tubes.
Sometimes it’s hard to decide what kind of sauce to go for on a pasta. Red is tangy and bright and white is creamy and savory. Both have their merits. Today was the kind of day where I really felt the urge to be in the kitchen, so I indulged myself and made (then ate) both.
The tomato sauce–technically a marinara–is by Marcella Hazan, a famous Italian chef known for an incredible bolognese and particular cooking techniques. It’s no-nonsense and you have everything you need in your pantry already! You can easily add meatballs to it if plain sauce is too boring for you.
The cream sauce is a little more fancy and starts off with leeks, then portobello mushrooms, sage, and garlic.
Both pastas are topped with a healthy amount of freshly grated Pecorino Romano cheese.
Marcella Hazan’s Tomato Sauce
Ingredients
1 28 oz can of whole, peeled tomatoes, preferably San Marzano
1 medium onion, peeled and halved
5 tbsp butter
Salt, to taste
Optional additional ingredients:
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 tsp sugar
2-3 dashes cayenne pepper
Process
Place tomatoes, onion halves, and butter in a heavy-bottomed sauce pot. Cook on low and uncovered for 45 minutes. If using optional ingredients, you can add them with the tomatoes. Discard onion and toss with 1/2 lb cooked bucatini pasta and freshly grated Romano cheese.
Mushroom Sage Bucatini
Ingredients
8 oz chopped mushrooms
1 tbsp chopped sage
4 cloves minced garlic
3 tbsp butter
2 leeks, chopped
1/2 tbsp Worcestershire sauce
1/2 lb cooked bucatini pasta
1 cup reserved pasta water
Salt, to taste
Grated Pecorino Romano cheese, as desired
Process
Heat butter in a large skillet on medium. Add leeks and stir until translucent, about 5 minutes. Add in mushrooms, sage, and garlic and increase heat to high. Stir until mushrooms are golden and most of the water from them has evaporated. Add salt, the Worcestershire sauce, and pasta water, cooking until the liquid has reduced by half. Toss with cooked bucatini pasta and freshly grated Romano cheese.
