Homemade pasta and buttery tomato sauce

I know, pasta with tomato sauce doesn’t sound very exciting. And it isn’t, usually. But when you match recipes from two of the highest quality food bloggers on the internet today, how can you go wrong? Those were my thoughts exactly.

Let me tell you, this dinner was so far from going wrong, I was asking entirely the wrong question. I underestimated how good both of these recipes would be, probably because of their delightfully simple list of ingredients. The pasta? Just egg and flour, and a dash of salt for the boiling water. The sauce? Canned tomato, onions, and butter. Instead of asking what could go wrong, I should have asked what could be better.

The answer is NOTHING.I expected this dinner to be tasty but it actually blew me away. The sauce, as everyone who writes about it says (but no one seems to believe until they make it) was amazingly sophisticated. I’m not sure if it was the butter or the onion, but it took on the rich taste of a meat sauce but the texture of silk. The pasta was the perfect firmness and held up much better than I ever expected. It held the sauce like it was meant to wear it. It made me wish I never had to make pasta from a box again.

If you’ve ever had the urge to make your own pasta, do it and use the two recipes below:

The Pioneer Woman Cooks!: Homemade pasta

Smitten Kitchen: Tomato sauce with onion and butter

Some recipe notes: I needed a bit more flour for the pasta than the recipe suggested. I suspect this had to do with the fact that the flour was being measured by volume rather than weight. Just keep your flour around until you are sure you don’t need more. For the pasta sauce, I was out of cans of whole tomatoes and only had tomato sauce around. I also diced the onion since I like bits of onion in my sauce. If my sauce was outstanding with those substitutions, I’m pretty sure it can only get better with better ingredients.

One year ago: Tomato Rice Soup

Related posts:Cheesy Macaroni with Baked Acorn Squash and Tomato Sauce
Tomato and Sausage Risotto, à la Smitten Kitchen and Martha Stewart
Velvet Lemon Pasta Sauce, Revisited