We're going to have a little chat about some store cupboard essentials that we keep
always in our home
to make a pasta sauce any night of the week
and it really, realy is simple. These are things you can keep, they're long life
and they're always there to help you out in an emergency
and really
even though there's lots of different ingredients here. It looks a bit scary. You don't need them all.
It really comes down to this
which is where the story starts
and it is as simple as
an onion,
a piece of garlic,
and really some olive oil
because this is where
the juices really
form your base of most pasta sauces. A tin of tomatoes, back up emergency.
Stock
lasts for ages, always have that as backup. Salt and pepper, hey!
If you like to cook, you hopefully have that in the back of your cupboard.
So this, really
is the start of
your pasta toolkit. And
we've actually done a recipe with just using these basic ingredients.
These here are few other little ingredients.
We've got some dried chilli flakes and peperoncino, which is cayenne pepper.
I put these are the most of my dishes just to give that little bit of heat.
We've done a recipe as well with these, so we've taken the basic
and we added a bit of chilli, with some pancetta and that gives you a nice arrabiatta.
Dried bay leaves keep for ages, you know one of these leaves
one will go a long way and add so much flavour and depth.
Oregano, a classic Italian herb, again just a pinch of it at the end of your
recipe.
Here we got some walnuts. We've got pine nuts,
roasted, toasted
as they are.
Nuts are fabulous in most pasta sauces just to give it that bit of texture, flavour.
So moving onto this little cluster here. So passata
is nothing more really than blitzed tin tomatoes
but I tell you what does add to your dish is tomato puree, it comes in a tin, it
comes in a
squidgy tube. You can add a little spoon of that
to your basics down here
and it really thickens your sauce and it again, adds depth really, adds depth and seasoning and it's
all about taste, taste, taste. Adding these little, little tweaks
not all of them try to stick to four max
This little section down here is really about lots and lots of different tinned goods.
The date on this is something crazy like twenty seventeen
so that you can have them backup, backup options to flavour your sauces.
And we've done a great one with your
basic tomato sauce,
tuna and capers. So a little bit of a fishy combination. Here we've got some anchovies.
If you put some anchovies with some capers, that's
almost seasoning in it's own right. They're quite salty.
Another dried essential that you could have is your porchini mushrooms
These go a long way, if you want to do a mushroom pasta
the flavour that comes from those if you add boiling water to them and the juices you
use as a stock,
is just on another level. I think more than anything they are a bit more pricey
but again they're dried. So they can keep in a jar for months and months and
months on end.
And when you've got a little bit, maybe an unexpected guest;
Pop them in some boiling water,
blitz them up and then add them to your tomato sauce and
another trick there
is maybe a mushroom stock cube
And boy oh boy will you impress with just these alone.
It's less about
buying these ingredients to make your pasta sauce and more about what have you already
got in your cupboard.
These are some of our store cupboard essentials. Don't be afraid
that you have to have all of them. Start simply, build it
up, see what you like according to your pallette
But really just experiment and have a go. And we'd love to hear what your store cupboard
essentials are. So write in the comments box below. I want to know what you guys have,
because we might be missing a trick here!
So we'd love to hear from you