Ultimate 5 Pasta Sauces

The Spanish love pasta as much as anybody else and you can be sure that if there’s not a rice dish featuring on the first course of any Menu del Dia in Barcelona, then there will be a pasta dish. There’s plenty of Italian style restaurants in the city and the aisles of the supermarkets and stalls within the markets have plenty of choice of pasta shapes and sizes. 

I’ve spent a good deal of time over the past few years visiting regional Italy and made a real effort to perfect or tweak many pasta dishes that I’ve been cooking for years.  Here in Catalonia by the Med we have pretty much the same abundance of fresh produce to make some amazing sauces.  This class will be one for all pasta lovers. We´ll go over the classics and cook some lesser known sauces.  We’ll make some fresh pasta too and if we have time we’ll try and fit in a 6th sauce! We’ll sample all as we cook. The 5 sauces will almost certainly comprise:

Carbonara

We’ll kick off with a breakfast/brunch dish of eggs and bacon pasta (Carbonara) and there’s also the opportunity for a vote on which two pasta dishes to serve up a decent sized portion of at the end of the class, with a glass of wine of course.

Our Carbonara will be approaching as classic as possible.

Seafood Arrabiata

This is a must-cook meal for this class, cooking close to the Med and surrounded by wonderful seafood in the near-by markets.  It always has that stunning good-looks factor wherever it’s served.  We’ll spice it up just enough and I have a feeling we might be serving it up at the end of the class!
Classic Ragu

Commonly known outside Italy as Bolognese!  I cook a lighter summer version and a heavier one for winter dinners.  We’ll discuss all possibilities and no-go areas with this sauce

Classic Pesto Genovese

This is a sauce worth attending the class alone for.  Wonderfully pungent; simple and complex at the same time.   It’s all about the quality of the ingredients.      

Puttanesca

Year by year this increasingly becomes one of my all-time favourite pasta sauces.  Its simplicity and the sum of its few store cupboard ingredients lifts it beyond expectations.  

Pasta Victor

Twenty-odd years ago I was tired, hungry and thirsty walking through Beverly Hills in LA and walked into the first restaurant I could find.  It was Chez Victor (and is still happening I think).  I ordered a dish called Pasta Victor and find it amazing that I’m still cooking it today.  It was very much California pasta of its day……sun dried tomatoes, chicken, coriander, sweetcorn…ingredients I would never normally put near my traditional pasta sauces.  But everybody loves it.  It works!  Sometimes I give it a Catalan touch by swapping chicken with rabbit. 

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