Spaghetti with Fresh Tomato, Potato & Basil (Spaghetti con Pomodoro Fresco, Patate e Basilico)

Summer is upon us and that means that tomato season is starting! Finally, we are starting to see real, juicy, sweet, succulent tomatoes… Yippee! If you love pasta with tomato and want a recipe that highlights fresh, ripe summer tomatoes, then read on about Spaghetti with Fresh Tomato, Potato & Basil. This lovely dish with barely cooked tomatoes, perfumed with fresh basil, and deliciously creamy from the potato is a winner. It’s light, economical, and absolutely delicious. It’s also a little bit out of the norm.

Beautiful Calabria…

This is another recipe from my Calabrian family, like Spaghetti alle Corte d’Assise and my favorite Calabrian Stuffed Eggplants. It was something that my cousin Rosa whipped up one night and, although it was simple, it was so satisfying and delightful. Since she’s a kitchen goddess, I basically follow her around the kitchen with a notebook. Hence, I was able to jot the recipe down. Grazie Rosa!

La Cucina Povera

Spaghetti with Fresh Tomato, Potato & Basil is straight out of La Cucina Povera, meaning poor folks’ food. It is a dish made out of very simple ingredients: spaghetti, extra virgin olive oil, fresh tomato, potato, onion, and basil. That’s it. It’s humble yet scrumptious. During the cooking process, the potato dissolves a little into the sauce and helps to make it creamy and luscious. You see genius dishes like this throughout the south of Italy. The contadini (farmers) would use ingredients that they had on hand from their gardens and larder and turn them into gold.

It’s all about the ingredients…

For this dish to sing, you need to use the best ingredients you can get your hands on. Otherwise, the results will be mundane rather than sublime. Supermarket tomatoes will not work here. You need to buy them from a farmer’s market or, if you’re lucky, get them straight from your garden. That’s essentially the key to Italian cooking, procuring brilliant ingredients and letting them shine. When Rosa made this – she went to her yard. The only purchased ingredient was the spaghetti. Impressively, my cousins press their own extra virgin olive oil and grow their own onions, tomatoes, potatoes, and basil. For us mere mortals, we have to buy our oil and do the best we can…

Notes

This recipe is for 4 Italian sized servings of 75 grams/3.6 oz of spaghetti. It’s expected that you will also have a vegetable, salad and maybe some olives or other nibbles during the meal. Keep in mind that the potato will also contribute to filling you up. If you are used to larger portions of pasta, you may want to increase the quantities to suit your family. This is a rather normal portion size here in Italy. I leave that up to you. Also, the sauce is very light and rather thin. Don’t expect a heavy, thick sauce here.

I have written the recipe in grams and ounces. If you have a scale, I suggest that you use the gram measurements. It’s much easier and worth getting used to for those of you in America. I saw a cookbook review recently where a cook complained about a book from England because she had to convert all of the recipes to ounces. Don’t bother. If you have an electronic scale, most of them are capable of weighing both ounces and grams. Once you start using the metric system, you’ll never look back and will start cursing your measuring cups as I do. Cooking by weight is more accurate and requires fewer dishes. One of my favorite Italian blogs, Memorie di Angelina has a good page on measuring, describing this very thing. Check it out and Frank’s wonderful blog.

Now – to the recipe for Spaghetti with Fresh Tomato, Potato & Basil. Happy cooking and buon appetito!

Spaghetti with Fresh Tomato, Potato & Basil

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Serves: 4

Nutrition facts: 200 calories 20 grams fat

Rating: 5.0/5

( 3 voted )

Ingredients

• 300 grams (10.5 oz) spaghetti
• 2-4 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil, or more to taste
• 500 grams (1 lb 1 oz) tomatoes, washed & cored
• 250 grams (9 oz) potatoes, such as Yukon Gold, peeled & cut into 1/2-inch cubes
• 1/2 red onion, peeled, with the core still intact
• salt and pepper to taste
• 1-2 sprigs fresh basil, or more to taste
• freshly grated Parmigiano Reggiano cheese, optional

Instructions

1. Bring a large pot of water to a boil. Once the water is boiling, add enough salt to make it taste like sea water, add the onion, and the cored tomatoes.
2. Boil the tomatoes for a couple of minutes to loosen the skins. Scoop them out with a skimmer and peel when cool enough to handle. (Leave the onion in the water.) Put the tomatoes through a food mill, using the largest holes. Place the tomato puree in a bowl and add extra virgin olive oil, torn fresh basil leaves, and salt and pepper, all to taste. Set aside.
3. Meanwhile, add the cubed potatoes to the boiling water and cook for 5 minutes.
4. Add the spaghetti to the potatoes and cook them together until the pasta is al dente.
5. Gently drain the pasta and potatoes in a colander, keeping some of the pasta water clinging to the noodles. Remove the onion and place the sauce and spaghetti into the pot and place over low heat. Cook, stirring constantly for a minute or so to meld the flavors, and to break up some of the potatoes.
6. Turn off the heat, check for seasoning and serve immediately with fresh basil on top and, if desired, some grated cheese.

Notes

If you want to cool the tomatoes quickly, you may run them under cold water. Alternately, you can place them in ice water. It's not really necessary though. If you don't have a food mill, puree the tomatoes in a blender or food processor, though it will not remove the seeds as a food mill does. If you like heat as I do, you can mince some fresh Calabrese or cayenne chilies and throw them on top as you serve. That's my little touch since I'm addicted to spice! I am half Calabrese after all...