Good oil is crucial.
But it's not the star.
With oil-based sauces you're sometimes shining the spotlight on a few key ingredients, sometimes building on those foundations to create more complicated and extravagant recipes.
With very few oil-slicks. Honestly.
In much the same way as some of the earliest pasta dishes were a combination of a fat (butter), cheese and other flavours, modern oil-based pasta dishes can showcase not only the pasta shape or pasta type or just its freshness, but also the unique taste and quality of the other main ingredients. Oil-based pasta sauces can be dry pasta, fresh pasta, stuffed pasta, fried pasta or baked pasta and offer almost limitless combination of ingredients.
oily can be saucy
One of the key concepts to grasp with oil-based sauces is that just because there isn’t a medium like tomato or butter or cream or a pesto to deliver flavour in the final dish doesn’t mean that the pasta can’t have a ’sauce’ or be ‘dressed’. In some of the most simple oil-based recipes, a good deal of flavour is actually delivered by the extra virgin oil used. In other recipes, cooking techniques like ‘mantecatura’ can be used to create a velvety, juicy sauce that compliments the other flavours in your dish. Other recipes again will include sauces that have been made out of blended vegetables, or ‘white’ ragùs that are as rich and satisfying as any tomato based sauce.
pragmatic pasta
The simplicity of many oil based sauces means that they’re sometimes quicker and simpler dishes to put together. In Pasta & Magic, I talk about ‘pragmatic pasta’ choices - which is the art of striking a balance between taste, quality of ingredients, budget and speed or ease of preparation. It’s something that you’ll get better and better at, the more you become familiar with the pasta or ingredients that are available to you on a regular basis. A ridiculously simple example : you need to rustle up a semi-impressive evening meal that you haven’t got the time to make the fresh ravioli you’d like to. The ‘pragmatic pasta’ solution would be to buy the best quality store-prepared ravioli you can find, and add really good quality fresh ingredients to dress them with. Or instead of buying fresh mussels that need to be scrubbed and cleaned, buying ‘boil in the bag’ mussels that can be easily added to pasta recipes. And I know it’s tempting to think of this kind of thing as cheating. But I disagree. You need to have the skills and knowledge to know what you can do with the pre-prepared ingredients available to you. And you can’t ‘cheat’ having the skills and knowledge to be able to do that; you can either do it and create a great meal, or you can’t.
