The Art of Caramelizing Pasta: A Journey from Long Strands to Squiggly Delights

As we begin our culinary journey, we find ourselves with a long, caramelized strand of pasta. This is just the beginning of our adventure, as we take this beautiful strand and transform it into something entirely new. We're going to add a little bit of water, not too much, but just enough to help the pasta absorb the liquid. As we slowly cook, reduce, and turn the pasta, we notice that it's starting to take on a life of its own. The caramelized strands are giving way to more traditional, squiggly shapes of pasta.

At this point, we're in the midst of a typical pasta realm, where our expectations of what pasta should be start to fade away. We're no longer confined by traditional notions of texture and shape. Instead, we're free to experiment and push the boundaries of what's possible with pasta. The addition of water is crucial at this stage, as it allows the pasta to absorb the flavors and aromas of the sauce. As we continue to cook and reduce, the sauce starts to take on a deeper, more complex character.

One technique that comes to mind when cooking caramelized onions is the process of adding a small amount of liquid to the pan just as the onions are starting to brown. This helps to prevent them from burning and sticking to the pan. As we apply this same principle to our pasta, we're essentially mimicking the exact same steps. We add water to the pan, reduce it, and then repeat the process until we achieve the desired level of caramelization.

The origin of spaghetti carbonara is a fascinating tale that has been passed down through generations. According to legend, a chef was tasked with creating a dish that would be extremely spicy, but he also forgot about the dish while he was preparing it. By the time he presented it to the customer, the pasta had reduced significantly and had taken on a rich, caramelized flavor. The customer loved it, and the name "Assassin" was born. This spicy, savory dish has since become a staple of Italian cuisine, with its characteristic balance of flavors and textures.

As we approach the final stages of our cooking process, we begin to plate up our creations. We use tweezers to take a delicate helping of pasta and place it onto the plate, creating a beautiful presentation that showcases the dish's unique characteristics. Alternatively, we can use tongs to add a flourish to the plate, setting them on the inside of the plate before twirling it around to create a symmetrical design.

Tasting our finished dishes, we're met with a flavor profile that is both familiar and yet entirely new. The pasta has been infused with the deep, rich flavors of the tomato sauce, which has taken on a slightly bitter sweetness as it cooks down. The crunchy bits add a satisfying texture to each bite, almost like the crunchy part of lasagna. As we explore the flavors of our creations, we realize that this is not just another pasta dish – it's an experience.

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"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhello there welcome back to another episode of anything with Alvin where this time we're going to be making spaghetti Al assassina or killer spaghetti this spaghetti is directly cooked in the sauce almost a crime to what I would consider normal pasta cooking that originates from Italy and it seems like a dish that is very interesting and honestly just looks super delicious so let's get started I want to thank Squarespace for sponsoring this episode and supporting the BCU from the very beginning I'm excited to announce my new website b a.sh or as I like to call it babby Dosh the ultimate destination for all things BCU there's all the recipes from my videos exclusive new recipes you can search by genre or ingredient you can even toggle between us and metric and scale the serving size we heard your feedback about everything you wanted from the site so that's what we did you can get 10% off your first Squarespace order by visiting squarespace.com sbish now this version we're making today comes from Chef CSO from Urban lasassa Urbana we're going to start by opening some tomato cans these are pada Tomatoes or preferably San Marzano Tomatoes if you can find the real ones so once the Tomato cans are opened we're going to peel some garlic 24 cloes to be exact and we're also going to keep them whole the garlic is not actually fried in the oil it's almost simmered and slightly com feed to the point where it seasons and flavors the oil and if you slice the garlic a little too thin you can run the risk of burning those chips which makes the oil kind of burnt and bad first in a medium pan we're going to go ahead and put 1 cup of olive oil and throw in all of our garlic cloves in there running this on a very low heat not trying to get any color on these garlic cloves just looking for some slight bubbling to indicate that the garlic is slowly cooking this is going to take some time so let's get started on our sauce these Tomatoes I'm cooking down whole in a pan over a medium low heat and honestly I like using whole versus crushed tomatoes because you crust them with the spoon and they're good tomatoes they kind of pop a little bit like giant red Italian Boba which sounds illegal uh I didn't say that let's just uh let's just move on now we're going to Salt our crushed tomatoes and let that cook over a medium to low heat while stirring just to let them break down for a good amount once about 30 minutes or so have passed and we're keeping a good eye on our garlic oil we're going to transfer Our tomato sauce into a container so that we can Blitz them with an immersion blender I think for this kind of pasta a smooth application of a tomato sauce makes the most sense once the sauce has been Blitz we're going to pour that back to the pan to reduce slightly a little bit more now we're going to work on our garlic oil now in the video it seems to be a little bit of garlic residue in the oil heat spoons into the pan it might be tastier to actually get some of the garlic in the dish so we're going to take the immersion blender again and Blitz our slowly soft simmered garlic into the oil so that we get little chunks in there as well and because he mentions that the sauce has a little bit of garlic flavor we're going to spoon some of this garlic blitzed oil into our sauce cook that a little bit together and add some basil some nice fresh basil I like to use whole sprigs kind of let that stew in there for just a little bit don't want to get that brown then take that out and set that aside okay now we're back to the point in the video where everything is ready to be cooked in our reference video the spaghetti is first started by putting some of that garlic oil and toasting that with chili flake into a pan pretty generous with our oil here probably at 1/4 of a cup and a good teaspoon of these pepper and Chino once that starts to get a nice Aroma we're going to go ahead and throw in 1/2 lb of a spaton a thicker spaghetti seems to work the best especially having to hold up to all this you know stuff we're going to put it through now this is the fun part we're toasting dry spaghetti essentially sautéing it with a little bit of oil garlic and chili in a pan until it gets Brown there's no water involved here almost seem sacriligious if you didn't realize it was a real dish in Italy also as to add another BR break to the cooking process it is also necessary to spill your pasta on the counter that is not traditional I made that up because I'm spilling once again okay so based on the video that we referenced what I'm looking for is not burn pasta but kind of like deep dark brown charring on every individual pasta strand it's almost like cooking risotto where you toast the rice beforehand but after all the pasta has been browned pretty nicely we're adding a good heaping lle full of sauce or two I don't know the exact measurements that the chef uses but I believe this is one of those dishes where you kind of have to add it by eye and he says in the video that balance between perfectly burnt perfectly sauce overcooked undercooked perfectly charred is kind of a Feeling and I kind of understand that because every sort of pasta is different you know things aren't usually measured by the gram and this is one of those things that seems like you really need to have an attentive eye to make it correctly so we're going to go in with a good amount of sauce and cook that down and watch as the pasta goes from these long caramelized strands to more of the pasta that we might be used to you know more of those squiggly flexible kinds of noodles a little bit more encouraging now that we have entered a more typical pasta realm and then we're going to add a little bit of water not too much water though but we do need some extra water so that the pasta can actually absorb the liquid this is going to slowly cook we're going to reduce it keep turning the pasta but not too much cuz you do want some charring in the bottom and continue to either add water and to turn now to me this technique almost reminds me of cooking caramelized onions with caramelized onions you're cooking the onions in a fat you're toasting them until they get brown but when they almost get a little bit burnt and start to stick you add some water to the glaz reduce the water out let that get even darker continue reducing continue cooking and repeating that process this is almost mimicking the exact same steps I've decided to add a little bit more sauce at the end because this looks a little bit dry and now the pasta is starting to gloriously stick to the pen just a little bit we're getting those crunchy bits the sauce from the tomatoes is starting to reduce and really caramelize you can see the Tomato residue and the sugar is also from the Tomato starting to caramelize which is a very good sign this is now turning into a more sticky like pasta now the origin of spaghetti asasina is actually kind of interesting to me my personal favorite is the one where a businessman went into to a restaurant and asked a chef to make a pasta dish extremely spicy and the pasta Chef not only made it extremely spicy by putting in a lot of chili he also actually forgot about the dish while he was making it and it let all the water reduce out and the Tomato St started to caramelized and almost charred and burn the pasta he still had to serve the customer so he turned it into what it was served it to the customer even with all the crunchy bits and to his Delight the customer loved it I'm guessing he loved how spicy it was and I think that's where they got the Assassin moniker is that it's so spicy it might kill you and I think it's time to Plate up first we're going to Plate these up with some tweezers in a ladle and kind of give that spinning technique to play it as if this were a more of a higher end restaurant there's also a really cool technique where you just have tongs take a nice helping of the pasta and instead of twirling the tongs onto the plate you set them on the inside of the plate and you twirl the plate now I actually prefer this method because I think if you twirl the plate you end up with a lot cleaner of amount of pasta so this is also that technique and also you get to put more pasta on the plate it's actually looking pretty similar to the on that I've seen after doing some research some crunchy bits there there's some red pockets of sawu you can clearly see that some of the pasta even though has been cooked through with some liquid is still quite crunchy and caramelized so I'm really excited to actually see how this tastes this taste is very good it's very very very strong cuz if you think about it the pasta was cooking not in water but in tomato sauce so the powerful flavor of tomato kind of runs through it's tomato and chili those are the two dominant flavors and because the tomato is cooked down it doesn't taste like a typical red sauce it tastes like a deeper slightly Bitter Sweet powerful packed tomato like a tomato punched you in the face and took your lunch money but you liked it for some reason we obviously had to let the team try it they definitely dove in all were really excited by the flavor it was not really like any other pasta that we typically eat and honestly I kind of like the crunchy bits the best it's almost like the crunchy part of lasagna and I wish I slightly chartred it just a bit more so next time we have to go home and go assassinate some pasta once again but not today today everybody else assassinated the pasta with their mouths thanks again to Squarespace for sponsoring today's episode from websites to online stores to domains to analytics Squarespace is the all-in-one platform for you to build your online presence all of my websites over the years have been with Squarespace and I'm excited to share the new one Babi Dosh we were able to use Squarespace is website builder and custom Integrations to create a site that provides a powerful cooking experience if you want to try Squarespace for yourself you can start your free trial today by visiting squarespace.com bavage to get 10% off your first purchasehello there welcome back to another episode of anything with Alvin where this time we're going to be making spaghetti Al assassina or killer spaghetti this spaghetti is directly cooked in the sauce almost a crime to what I would consider normal pasta cooking that originates from Italy and it seems like a dish that is very interesting and honestly just looks super delicious so let's get started I want to thank Squarespace for sponsoring this episode and supporting the BCU from the very beginning I'm excited to announce my new website b a.sh or as I like to call it babby Dosh the ultimate destination for all things BCU there's all the recipes from my videos exclusive new recipes you can search by genre or ingredient you can even toggle between us and metric and scale the serving size we heard your feedback about everything you wanted from the site so that's what we did you can get 10% off your first Squarespace order by visiting squarespace.com sbish now this version we're making today comes from Chef CSO from Urban lasassa Urbana we're going to start by opening some tomato cans these are pada Tomatoes or preferably San Marzano Tomatoes if you can find the real ones so once the Tomato cans are opened we're going to peel some garlic 24 cloes to be exact and we're also going to keep them whole the garlic is not actually fried in the oil it's almost simmered and slightly com feed to the point where it seasons and flavors the oil and if you slice the garlic a little too thin you can run the risk of burning those chips which makes the oil kind of burnt and bad first in a medium pan we're going to go ahead and put 1 cup of olive oil and throw in all of our garlic cloves in there running this on a very low heat not trying to get any color on these garlic cloves just looking for some slight bubbling to indicate that the garlic is slowly cooking this is going to take some time so let's get started on our sauce these Tomatoes I'm cooking down whole in a pan over a medium low heat and honestly I like using whole versus crushed tomatoes because you crust them with the spoon and they're good tomatoes they kind of pop a little bit like giant red Italian Boba which sounds illegal uh I didn't say that let's just uh let's just move on now we're going to Salt our crushed tomatoes and let that cook over a medium to low heat while stirring just to let them break down for a good amount once about 30 minutes or so have passed and we're keeping a good eye on our garlic oil we're going to transfer Our tomato sauce into a container so that we can Blitz them with an immersion blender I think for this kind of pasta a smooth application of a tomato sauce makes the most sense once the sauce has been Blitz we're going to pour that back to the pan to reduce slightly a little bit more now we're going to work on our garlic oil now in the video it seems to be a little bit of garlic residue in the oil heat spoons into the pan it might be tastier to actually get some of the garlic in the dish so we're going to take the immersion blender again and Blitz our slowly soft simmered garlic into the oil so that we get little chunks in there as well and because he mentions that the sauce has a little bit of garlic flavor we're going to spoon some of this garlic blitzed oil into our sauce cook that a little bit together and add some basil some nice fresh basil I like to use whole sprigs kind of let that stew in there for just a little bit don't want to get that brown then take that out and set that aside okay now we're back to the point in the video where everything is ready to be cooked in our reference video the spaghetti is first started by putting some of that garlic oil and toasting that with chili flake into a pan pretty generous with our oil here probably at 1/4 of a cup and a good teaspoon of these pepper and Chino once that starts to get a nice Aroma we're going to go ahead and throw in 1/2 lb of a spaton a thicker spaghetti seems to work the best especially having to hold up to all this you know stuff we're going to put it through now this is the fun part we're toasting dry spaghetti essentially sautéing it with a little bit of oil garlic and chili in a pan until it gets Brown there's no water involved here almost seem sacriligious if you didn't realize it was a real dish in Italy also as to add another BR break to the cooking process it is also necessary to spill your pasta on the counter that is not traditional I made that up because I'm spilling once again okay so based on the video that we referenced what I'm looking for is not burn pasta but kind of like deep dark brown charring on every individual pasta strand it's almost like cooking risotto where you toast the rice beforehand but after all the pasta has been browned pretty nicely we're adding a good heaping lle full of sauce or two I don't know the exact measurements that the chef uses but I believe this is one of those dishes where you kind of have to add it by eye and he says in the video that balance between perfectly burnt perfectly sauce overcooked undercooked perfectly charred is kind of a Feeling and I kind of understand that because every sort of pasta is different you know things aren't usually measured by the gram and this is one of those things that seems like you really need to have an attentive eye to make it correctly so we're going to go in with a good amount of sauce and cook that down and watch as the pasta goes from these long caramelized strands to more of the pasta that we might be used to you know more of those squiggly flexible kinds of noodles a little bit more encouraging now that we have entered a more typical pasta realm and then we're going to add a little bit of water not too much water though but we do need some extra water so that the pasta can actually absorb the liquid this is going to slowly cook we're going to reduce it keep turning the pasta but not too much cuz you do want some charring in the bottom and continue to either add water and to turn now to me this technique almost reminds me of cooking caramelized onions with caramelized onions you're cooking the onions in a fat you're toasting them until they get brown but when they almost get a little bit burnt and start to stick you add some water to the glaz reduce the water out let that get even darker continue reducing continue cooking and repeating that process this is almost mimicking the exact same steps I've decided to add a little bit more sauce at the end because this looks a little bit dry and now the pasta is starting to gloriously stick to the pen just a little bit we're getting those crunchy bits the sauce from the tomatoes is starting to reduce and really caramelize you can see the Tomato residue and the sugar is also from the Tomato starting to caramelize which is a very good sign this is now turning into a more sticky like pasta now the origin of spaghetti asasina is actually kind of interesting to me my personal favorite is the one where a businessman went into to a restaurant and asked a chef to make a pasta dish extremely spicy and the pasta Chef not only made it extremely spicy by putting in a lot of chili he also actually forgot about the dish while he was making it and it let all the water reduce out and the Tomato St started to caramelized and almost charred and burn the pasta he still had to serve the customer so he turned it into what it was served it to the customer even with all the crunchy bits and to his Delight the customer loved it I'm guessing he loved how spicy it was and I think that's where they got the Assassin moniker is that it's so spicy it might kill you and I think it's time to Plate up first we're going to Plate these up with some tweezers in a ladle and kind of give that spinning technique to play it as if this were a more of a higher end restaurant there's also a really cool technique where you just have tongs take a nice helping of the pasta and instead of twirling the tongs onto the plate you set them on the inside of the plate and you twirl the plate now I actually prefer this method because I think if you twirl the plate you end up with a lot cleaner of amount of pasta so this is also that technique and also you get to put more pasta on the plate it's actually looking pretty similar to the on that I've seen after doing some research some crunchy bits there there's some red pockets of sawu you can clearly see that some of the pasta even though has been cooked through with some liquid is still quite crunchy and caramelized so I'm really excited to actually see how this tastes this taste is very good it's very very very strong cuz if you think about it the pasta was cooking not in water but in tomato sauce so the powerful flavor of tomato kind of runs through it's tomato and chili those are the two dominant flavors and because the tomato is cooked down it doesn't taste like a typical red sauce it tastes like a deeper slightly Bitter Sweet powerful packed tomato like a tomato punched you in the face and took your lunch money but you liked it for some reason we obviously had to let the team try it they definitely dove in all were really excited by the flavor it was not really like any other pasta that we typically eat and honestly I kind of like the crunchy bits the best it's almost like the crunchy part of lasagna and I wish I slightly chartred it just a bit more so next time we have to go home and go assassinate some pasta once again but not today today everybody else assassinated the pasta with their mouths thanks again to Squarespace for sponsoring today's episode from websites to online stores to domains to analytics Squarespace is the all-in-one platform for you to build your online presence all of my websites over the years have been with Squarespace and I'm excited to share the new one Babi Dosh we were able to use Squarespace is website builder and custom Integrations to create a site that provides a powerful cooking experience if you want to try Squarespace for yourself you can start your free trial today by visiting squarespace.com bavage to get 10% off your first purchase\n"