Homemade pasta and buttery tomato sauce

pasta enrobed in buttery tomato sauce

pasta enrobed in buttery tomato sauce

I know, pasta with tomato sauce doesn’t sound very exciting. And it isn’t, usually. But when you match recipes from two of the highest quality food bloggers on the internet today, how can you go wrong? Those were my thoughts exactly.

pasta in a bowl with a puddle of sauce on top

Let me tell you, this dinner was so far from going wrong, I was asking entirely the wrong question. I underestimated how good both of these recipes would be, probably because of their delightfully simple list of ingredients. The pasta? Just egg and flour, and a dash of salt for the boiling water. The sauce? Canned tomato, onions, and butter. Instead of asking what could go wrong, I should have asked what could be better.

pasta freshly cooked and drained

The answer is NOTHING.I expected this dinner to be tasty but it actually blew me away. The sauce, as everyone who writes about it says (but no one seems to believe until they make it) was amazingly sophisticated. I’m not sure if it was the butter or the onion, but it took on the rich taste of a meat sauce but the texture of silk. The pasta was the perfect firmness and held up much better than I ever expected. It held the sauce like it was meant to wear it. It made me wish I never had to make pasta from a box again.

raw pasta laid out in its fresh cut beauty

If you’ve ever had the urge to make your own pasta, do it and use the two recipes below:

The Pioneer Woman Cooks!: Homemade pasta

Smitten Kitchen: Tomato sauce with onion and butter

Some recipe notes: I needed a bit more flour for the pasta than the recipe suggested. I suspect this had to do with the fact that the flour was being measured by volume rather than weight. Just keep your flour around until you are sure you don’t need more. For the pasta sauce, I was out of cans of whole tomatoes and only had tomato sauce around. I also diced the onion since I like bits of onion in my sauce. If my sauce was outstanding with those substitutions, I’m pretty sure it can only get better with better ingredients.

pasta being hand cut using a ruler's edge on a cutting board

One year ago: Tomato Rice Soup


7 responses to “Homemade pasta and buttery tomato sauce”

    • It seems to be getting colder and colder here in NY. I was just about to ask how you’ve been keeping warm, but then I popped over to your blog and saw that you’re in Puerto Rico. That beats the heck out winter foods. Hope you’re having a fun time in the sun!

    • I actually was given the pasta roller for my birthday as well, so I probably won’t roll by hand anymore. It is possible though, you just have to be patient enough (and have enough space) to get it as thin as possible. The cutting was harder than the rolling, in my opinion.

  1. Thanks for posting about this! I tried it with my g/f, and it made Valentine’s Day really special (and yummy). Our pasta came out a little too thick, however. I think that my flat surface was too small. Next time, I’ll take only half of the dough before I start rolling, and then work on the other half only after the first one is cut.

    • It is really difficult to roll out by hand and cut thinly. I second the idea of cutting the dough in half before rolling and just doing it twice. That way you can get it as thin as possible to make up for the fact that it’s hard to cut thin strips.

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