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Recipe: Pasta Alla Vodka
Speaker: Chef Alec Lipschutz
"I wish you guys could smell this. Hey everybody, it's Chef Alec. We are in the Aramark kitchen. Dinner parties and supper clubs have become incredibly popular, and I know a lot of people want to host their own, but it might seem a little hard. So, I'm going to show you guys a recipe that's super easy to execute. It'll be the centerpiece of any party you want to throw.
So today, we're going to make a fun little twist on a classic dish: pasta alla vodka. So we have our ingredients right in front of us. We have some room temperature butter, some salt just for seasoning, we have some minced garlic, some chopped onions, tomato paste, cream, my favorite ingredient—a little bit of chopped Calabrian chili to spice it up a little bit—and then, of course, our vodka.
All right, we're going to start out by adding our butter to the pan. Cook this down on medium heat just until the butter melts. All righty, now that our butter is melted, we're going to go ahead and add our onions and our garlic. We're going to give those a nice stir, and we're just wanting to sweat these down a little bit. We don't really want to caramelize them, just cook them until they're soft and starting to get translucent.
All right, so our onions and our garlic are nice and soft. You want to get them right to this state without giving them too much color. Now, we're going to go ahead and add my Calabrian chili. You can use normal red chili flakes if you want, but I love the Calabrian chilis—they just have a great spiciness and depth of flavor and richness that really just adds a little extra to the dish.
And now, we're ready to go in with our tomato paste. So the tomato paste is really important to the dish, and the important thing that you got to do here is caramelize it and really cook it down. You don't want to go to the next steps until you've really got some nice flavor developed in your tomato paste. Now, the caramelizing and cooking process will take the sugars that are naturally in the tomato and kind of help cook them down, and it really adds the richness that makes the dish spectacular.
All right, this smells delicious already! I think our tomatoes are nice and caramelized, so we're going to go ahead and add the cream now. Another tip I want to emphasize here is it's really important to let your cream get close to room temperature. You don't really want to add anything super cold to anything hot, and having the cream be a little warm will just help it emulsify and be extra creamy. We're just going to stir that together until it's nice and smooth.
And now, we are going to add our vodka. Now, some of you might be wondering why I'm not cooking my vodka first to get rid of the alcohol. For this dish specifically, I really like the acidity and the astringency of uncooked vodka because it helps break up the richness to the dish.
All right, our sauce is looking and smelling beautiful! Now it's time to add the pasta. You can use any noodle you like. I love this dish so much, I'm going with heart-shaped pasta. So, we're just going to add it right in. Now, it's really important to coat your pasta well. I once was told that you can never overcoat pasta.
All right, our noodles are coated in our delicious sauce. Now, we're just going to bring it over to our plate, and we're just going to top it with some freshly grated Parmesan-Reggiano.
Now look at that! That's a dish that could be the star of any show."
