Restaurant ReCreations: Scarpetta's "Spaghetti with Tomato & Basil"

  

The finished product of my Restaurant ReCreation of
Scarpetta's "Spaghetti with Tomato & Basil"

Welcome to the first post in our series, Restaurant ReCreations, where we will take a look at some of your favorite restaurant dishes and explore how you can recreate them right at home in your very own kitchen! We will explore dishes from different cuisines and varying types of restaurants all while trying to keep it simple enough that the most amateur chef in all of us could follow along and turn out a quality interpretation of that restaurant's best offering. And with that in mind, let's jump into our first Restaurant ReCreations adventure!

The original at Scarpetta

Sometimes keeping things simple is the way to go even for the best of restaurants, and the "Spaghetti with Tomato & Basil" at Scarpetta is the delicious proof to the rule. A truly incredible revelation on the classic spaghetti with marinara sauce, this dish is the calling card of Chef Scott Conant at his world-reknowned restaurants found in New York City, Miami Beach, Las Vegas and Beverly Hills that are counted among the finest Italian establishments in the country. You may recognize Chef Conant from his role as a judge on Food Network's Chopped or his show 24 Hour Restaurant Battle, and he has been kind enough to have shared this recipe on an episode of America's Best, where it was voted the best iteration of one of America's favorite comfort foods, spaghetti. What this dish lacks in flair, it certainly more than makes up for in flavor!



And we're going to show you how to make it right at home! You hardly even need to make out a shopping list, it's that simple. Just make sure you have the secret weapon kitchen tool for the dish......a potato masher! (yes, potato...not a typo)

If you read Lisa's post on making a marinara sauce, it's OK to break the stereotype of a sauce having to cook ALL DAY. This is not grandma's Sunday sauce that has been cooking for hours on end. The way the dish is prepared results in a light, creamy, airy marinara sauce that makes for the perfect home cooked Italian bite. I have made this recipe a staple of my kitchen, and it has become my fiance's favorite dish and she always requests it for special occasions.

The key to what makes this dish so flavorful is the process. Follow along and I promise you will be able to make yourself one of the best plates of pasta you have ever tasted, home cooked or not. Here is what you will need:

Ingredients (for 2)

• A good haul of ripe Roma tomatoes (for me, about 10-12)*
• OR 2 14.5-oz cans of whole tomatoes*
• 6 oz. spaghetti, dried or fresh. (I use Barilla, good quality Italian pasta that's affordable)
• 1/4 cup olive oil (plus an extra tbsp.)
• 6 cloves fresh garlic (or 1 1/2 tbsp minced/chopped garlic)
• 4 oz. fresh basil
• 1 1/2 tbsp butter
• 2 tbsp. grated parmesan cheese
• Salt
• Pepper
• Crushed Red Pepper

* I say a good haul because I like a tomato-y sauce, but if that's not the case for you, this recipe is easy to adjust. I usually use about 10-12 for my sauce, and that's on the high end, both for taste and also because I try not to use canned tomatoes. If you come across those bright, firm, vibrant red Roma tomatoes, steer clear of the can. Otherwise, if canned tomatoes are needed due to a lack of or shortage of quality fresh tomatoes, try to go with as high quality whole Roma tomatoes as you can reasonably afford. The fewer ripe tomatoes, the more canned you use. So if you have 6 ripe Romas, try to use 4-6 from the can (there's usually about 7 in a 14.5 oz. can)

First things first, get a pot of water on the stove and start to bring it to a boil...you're going to need it multiple times for this dish.

"Scored" tomatoes with the X cut

To get the sauce started, we need to prep our tomatoes (if you're using only canned tomatoes, you can skip this part and pick back up with us after these fresh tomatoes have been peeled). What you'll want to do with your tomatoes is to cut off last 1/4 of an inch on the side where the tomato was once attached to the vine. On the opposite end, take a paring knife and cut the skin of the tomato in an "X" shape crossing the base and not going too deep. This technique is called "scoring" and will make the tomatoes easier to peel.

Once you have done this, you'll want to get that water boiling if it isn't already, and prepare an "ice bath," (a bowl of cold water and ice) nearby. When that water is properly boiling, drop those scored tomatoes in gently and let them boil for about 15-20 seconds before starting to remove them with a slotted spoon and placing them directly into the ice bath. The purpose of the ice bath is to quickly cool the tomatoes and stop the cooking process that began in the boiling water. All we want is for the skin of the tomatoes to soften and loosen, making them easy to peel.

Easy to peel tomatoes after 15 seconds

After you have removed all of the tomatoes, turn the water temperature down but keep it warm so that you can bring it to a boil quickly when we go to cook the pasta later on. Ideally, the boiling and ice bath process has made peeling the skin a breeze. If you're like me and love the "hands on" approach, I peel the tomatoes by hand, sliding off all of the outer layer of the skin. If getting down and dirty isn't your thing, a paring knife works just as well. Place the tip of the knife underneath the skin and gently peel it off, trying not to remove any of the meat of the tomato.

(Canned tomato users....welcome back to the party)

Once you've got your skinned tomatoes, it's time to seed them. Cut one of your tomatoes in half and you will see the seeds and juices of the inner tomatoes....here is where "hands on" becomes almost a necessity. You want to use those opposable thumbs of yours to get all of that stuff out of there, but not get rid of it so do it over a small bowl. What we want to get is the real meat of the tomato to use for the sauce, while the reserved liquid can come in handy later to adjust your sauce. Seeding is the most time-consuming element of this process, but after this...it's gravy.

After you've seeded the tomatoes, its time to get that sauce cooking. Take a medium-sized saucepot and add the 1 1/2 tbsp olive oil and set to a low-medium heat. When the oil is shimmering but not smoking (a drop of water should sizzle), add the tomato halves, a generous pinch (maybe even 2 pinches) of salt and dashes of black pepper and chili flakes. The salt is key as it helps to draw out the moisture and combine with the oil to flavor those tomatoes into a sauce. Stir that up to distribute the oil and salt and let the tomatoes cook for about 5 minutes to soften them up.

The secret weapon....

....hard at work

Remember that secret weapon kitchen tool we mentioned as a necessity above?? Yup, time to break out that potato...or in this case "tomato"...masher. Now that the tomatoes have softened, use the masher to begin breaking them apart so that they can release their delicious flavor and acidity into your sauce. No need to get violent with it, just use it for 1-2 minutes to break up the big pieces. Not all of the pieces will break down just yet....so repeat this step every 5 minutes or so along with a good stir as the sauce reduces. You want the sauce to cook for no longer than 45 minutes so that it retains that fresh tomato flavor that sets it apart. If you kept that extra tomato liquid from the seeding process, you can strain it (removing the seeds and the grainy, stringy elements) and add to the sauce to keep it from getting too thick..this sauce is not meant to be too thick and chunky.

KEY TO COOKING ALERT: Do not be afraid to taste your sauce SEVERAL TIMES throughout the cooking process. Ultimately, you are cooking to your own taste and palette and the sauce has to taste good to you! If it needs more salt, hit it with another pinch....too salty? Give another dash of black pepper to tone it down.

After you have gone through your first tomato mashing session, it's time to start of the second element of this wonderful sauce...a basil & garlic infused olive oil. Chef Conant devised that the better way to impart all of the flavor of basil and garlic into this dish without it getting too messy was to infuse olive oil with that flavor and then add that oil to the sauce right before serving. "The last thing you add will be the first thing you taste," he explained. "I think that's profound."

Take a small saucepot and pour in the 1/4 cup of olive oil and add the garlic, most of the basil (reserving a few leaves), and another dash of chili flakes and heat the mixture up at a low heat. The garlic should simmer but not brown...if its browning, the heat is too high. You want the oil to heat slowly, allowing time for the flavors of the garlic, basil, and red pepper flakes to transfer to the oil. At a low heat, it should take about 25 minutes for the garlic to start to brown and that should be plenty of time for the oil to take on all of those wonderful flavors and aromatics.

Mmmm...fresh basil & garlic infused olive oil

After 25 minutes, strain the oil to remove all of the garlic, basil leaves, pepper flakes, etc....all of those flavors are now part of the olive oil. Add the oil directly to the sauce, one tbsp. at all time, stirring it in so that the flavors are distributed through your sauce. Go in increments because if your sauce has not reduced enough, too much oil can make the sauce too liquidy and will prevent it from reaching the creamy texture we are going for. Reserve about 1 tbsp. of the oil to add at the very end for that "profound" flavor.

Next, bring that pot of water back to boil. Add some salt to the water and toss your spaghetti in, stirring every few minutes or so. We want to cook our spaghetti for about 9 minutes. Dried pasta usually takes about 10 minutes to be "al dente" (Italian for "to the tooth" or "to the bite") where the pasta retains some firmness, but is not hard. We want our pasta to cook about 90% of the way to "al dente" in the water, before we finish it in the sauce. After 9 minutes, save about 2 tbsp. of the pasta water and then drain the pasta.

While waiting for the pasta to cook, take your remaining basil leaves and roll them inside the largest leaf you have, like a cylinder and cut them very thinly, lengthwise. This is called a chiffonade cut, as the basil should look like little ribbons.

To finish the dish, we are going to plate the dish one at a time. Take  a medium saute pan over medium-high heat and ladle in about a cup of the sauce. By transferring the sauce to a pan with a larger surface area, it will reduce just a bit more and lock in all of the flavor. Add half of the drained pasta to the pan along with a tbsp. of the pasta water. The addition of the pasta water, which has accumulated the starchy qualities from cooking the pasta in it, helps the sauce adhere to and coat the pasta.

Let the pasta finish cooking over the heat for about 1 1/2 minutes, remove from the heat and then add half of each of the remaining ingredients....3/4 tbsp butter, 1 tbsp parmesan cheese, 1/2 tbsp. basil oil, and 1/2 of your chopped basil. The addition of the butter and oil is the final piece in bringing this dish together and add those elements of creaminess that elevate this sauce.

Here is the final step and it, too, is important. Toss the pasta VERY WELL. If you can do that in the pan with the flipping technique, fantastic. If not, that's ok....just be sure to take your tongs or spoon and vigorously whip that pasta around the pan, incorporating the butter, oil, and cheese. But the most important ingredient being added is air....that aeration process that occurs while the pasta is whipping around is what makes the pasta taste so light and elevates this dish to another level!

Transfer the dish to the plate and repeat the final plating steps with the second serving of pasta. Then top with a touch of parmesan and fresh basil and serve!

The "Spaghetti with Tomato & Basil" at one of Chef Conant's Scarpetta trattorias will usually run you a tab of $24....and after how good my own version has been, I have no doubt his is worth every penny. But follow these steps and you can enjoy a fair imitation for a fraction of the cost, especially when you factor in having to travel to Beverly Hills, Las Vegas, Miami or New York to get it!

I really hope that this can serve as a guide to your next culinary adventure as you try this dish out for yourself. Please get involved in the comments below, letting us know if your going to give it a shot and if you do, be sure to come back and let us know how it went! Pictures would also be much appreciated for a gallery of readers creations! You can email those to appetitofoodblog@gmail.com!

ENJOY!!!

If you have got a suggestion for the next installment in our Restaurant ReCreations series, email me at michael.appetito@gmail.com or leave it in the comments.