The Easiest Summer Tomato Pasta _ Ali Slagle _ NYT Cooking

Roughly we're all doing so good .

It's really coming together here also .

Can we just talk about how big this noodle is ?

Hi .

I'm a , I develop recipes and write about them today .

We are making tomato butter pasta , which is maybe the most simple pasta recipe I've ever developed .

And I think it's better for it .

I started thinking about my favorite ways to eat like the best summer tomato you can find .

And there are a couple of ways , one is a Greek salad , one is salad and one is to , and I thought about what those things have in common and for two of them , the , and the Greek salad you have raw tomato mixed with dairy .

And then I thought about pasta because I'm probably 40% pasta .

And I wanna make everything a pasta , the beauty of this dish and the kind of the whole point of this dish is that the tomato isn't really cooked .

It's cooked just long enough to emulsify with the butter , but it still is kind of like that crisp fruity tomato that we love to have in the summer time .

You grade the tomato because it kind of creates all of these little pieces that kind of nestle into the pasta and then you grate the butter .

So the point here is that the butter is so small that it melts and goes through the pasta so quickly that the tomato doesn't have enough time to cook .

The cool thing about this is I made it last week with not so good tomatoes and it was still really good , could be better with real good tomatoes .

But so we're gonna salt our pasta water .

I am using these enormous because they bring me immense joy .

Once they are al dente and extremely large , the sauce is really thin .

So you need something to cling to like the curliness of a noodle or a ridge .

We are gonna cut these tomatoes through their belly .

It's good to keep tomato when you leave them on the counter , put this side down because it helps keep mold out and helps them stay good longer .

I don't want to talk about fridge versus not fridge .

That's a really personal decision that I will not tell you what to do or what not to do .

So now we're just going to greet these guys .

So you want to kind of get like all , all of the fruit off , move it around and then you peeled your tomato .

The thing about this pasta is it really will only be as good as your tomatoes are .

This is when you have like that perfect tomato that you just want to eat unadulterated .

I am gonna add the garlic .

We have the grater out so we might as well just grate it .

So I would use small holes on the garlic .

This is our tomato business .

Salting tomato is kind of like when you're walking down the street and you're like , is there like a rose garden somewhere ?

Like I smell roses somewhere .

Tomato without salt .

Is that kind of like faint tomato flavor ?

If you salt your tomatoes , it's like you're putting your nose in the rose and it's everywhere .

I don't wanna say you need or you should because you're the keeper of your kitchen .

But salting the tomato generously will make this pasta taste like something um butter .

You want your butter cold so that it grates easier and it emulsifies once it hits the pasta .

If your sauce is ready before your pasta is ready , just stick this bowl in the fridge .

So it stays cold .

So this is our sauce .

Our pasta is ready .

All we're going to do is mix the sauce with the pasta and a little pasta water to help it all come together .

And then we've made pasta in like as long as it took the pasta to cook , I , you can smell right now just like , it smells like a tomato farm .

And as you work this together , this sort of like thin sauce will start to gloss the noodles and it will continue to thicken as it cools so a little bit of sauciness is still ok .

This to me is the perfect summer pasta .

Everything here .

The red pepper flakes , the garlic , the basil it all is supposed to be in support of the tomato .

This really is a tomato dish that is also a pasta dish .

Fruity tomato , just kind of like cushioned by this butter sauce .

It's really good and it feels like summer .