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Spaghetti with Tomato-Saffron Sauce
Milk Street Facebook Community member Clare Hardy of Durham, North Carolina takes a few pantry ingredients and makes an easy but elegant tomato sauce for pasta. She infuses allium-accented tomatoes with the one-of-kind fragrance and flavor of saffron, then enriches the sauce at the end with crème fraîche. Hardy uses finely chopped tomatoes sold in a carton (aseptic packaging); we found that canned crushed tomatoes have a similar texture and tend to be more widely available in supermarkets. The recipe below calls for spaghetti, but just about any pasta shape works nicely.
4-6
Servings
Don’t forget to bloom the saffron threads in ¼ cup of the reserved pasta water. This helps fully extract their flavor and aroma. Also, don’t substitute sour cream for the crème fraîche. Sour cream is lower in fat, so its taste and consistency are thinner, and it will break when heated.
35 minutes
Ingredients
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1
pound spaghetti
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Kosher salt and ground black pepper
Directions
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01In a large pot, bring 4 quarts water to a boil. Stir in the pasta and 1 tablespoon salt, then cook, stirring occasionally, until just shy of al dente. Reserve 1 cup of the cooking water, then drain. In a small bowl, stir together ¼ cup of the reserved water and the saffron; set aside.
Very good. Simple to make and better than a plain tomato sauce. Of course I added parmesan to it. Goes in the "make again" category even though I don't keep CRÈME FRAÎCHE on hand.