sausage and tomato pasta
Joshua McFadden
Another successful recipe from McFadden's book, Six Seasons of Pasta. This one is much less work than spaghetti and meatballs, and offers a similarly appealing flavor profile: rich red meat offset by acidic tomatoes. While cooking, I worried that the sauce appeared runny. But then the addition of butter and cheese at the end brought everything together. The sauce emulsified and incorporated nicely into the pasta. When we sat down to eat, the dish had great texture and balanced flavor.
Jackson and I both appreciate McFadden's recommendation to use a 50/50 split of parmesan and pecorino in Italian pasta dishes - it's a great cheese blend. I also like the humble, yet thoughtful approach McFadden takes. His recipes are un-fussy. They generally do not involve a lot of fancy ingredients or equipment, but are deliberate about how each ingredient is used.
One note to keep in mind is that McFadden has you form the ground pork into patties, then sear them in a skillet. This is a nice idea because it gets the pork well-browned. We used sausage meat that had been removed from its casings, which made for very dense patties. They were hard to break apart into chunks of ground pork after being browned. I don't think this is such a big issue, since with a bit of persistence the pork does eventually disperse. That said, if this is bothersome, an alternative approach would be to skip forming the patties and instead brown the sausages wholly intact, then cut them up.
As usual, we made this with homemade fettucine. I continue to use this recipe for egg pasta from Cook's Illustrated. The pasta comes out lighter than the recipes that use extra egg yolks, but I don't mind this, especially when I'm eating it with a rich, meaty sauce.