Saturday, September 28, 2013 – This is another cooking class cooking practice. I’ve always wanted to learn to make pasta sauces. (Not sure why. There’s no backstory here.) And this week, we made a tomato vodka pasta sauce in class. So I decided to replicate this recipe on my own.
Let’s start with the cast photo:
The original recipe called for dried chili peppers. But I couldn’t find any dried chili peppers, so I chopped up a jalapeno pepper. In retrospect, a whole jalapeno pepper was way too much. There was too much fire, and that’s after I picked out all the jalapeno pieces from my sauce. I also decided to spice things up with a bit of garlic.
I got some chicken thighs and poached them in some Madeira. In retrospect, I should have used chicken breast tenders like I used last time, or thinly sliced breast filets. Sure, dark meat tastes better and is cheaper, but the white meat cuts I get are usually less irregular, so they cook more evenly.
Not pictured: Boiling the fettuccine. Everyone knows how to boil pasta, so I’m not gonna waste your bandwidth by including a picture of it.
The sauce is mostly a tomato based sauce. If you look closely, you can still see some jalapeno chunks.
After simmering for a few minutes, the sauce thickened up considerably. And then I added cream:
Not pictured: Salt, black pepper, white pepper (white pepper is love), Ghirardelli square.
Wait, did you just say Ghirardelli square? Yes, yes I did. I noticed that the tomato sauce had every flavor profile in it except sweet and bitter. So I tossed in a quarter of a Ghirardelli bittersweet chocolate square.
So how was it? The tanginess of tomatoes, a hint of sweetness from the chocolate, and a little too much fire. Definitely too much fire.