Food Notes: 4/29
Beans, vodka sauce, breadcrumbs on pasta, plus sweet salads, disco fries and more
Vodka sauce is everywhere these days. So why not on beans?
My wife had come across a NYTimes social post about stretching the grocery budget and suddenly she was contemplating creative ways of cooking dried beans.
We maintain a large dried bean reserve, in part because we’re members of the Rancho Gordo Bean Club. The bean club isn’t exactly thrifty, but it does mean we have a regular supply of beans arriving in the house.
The concept was to make a penne alla vodka where the beans replaced the penne, a Fagiolo alla Vodka for those keeping track of these things. (Or Fazool alla vodka, if you’re from northern New Jersey).
We had a bag of the oversized Corona beans from Rancho Gordo which turns out are the best type of bean when you’re trying to imitate pasta. They kind of looked like little gnocchi in the sauce, though not quite as soft.
There is an irony here in that pasta is historically a money-saving food. During the Great Depression, many non-Italians began to eat Italian-ish spaghetti dishes precisely because pasta is a low cost food. In New York City, for instance, after years of trying to make Italian immigrant children more American by feeding them “American” foods, in the Depression era, spaghetti became a dish city social workers foisted on Puerto Ricans as a money-saving alternative.
And sure, vodka sauce isn’t exactly a cost-saving sauce either. Bacon, cream, vodka—these is a luxury sauce embodying the abbondanza. But they were all items already in our pantry, so free to us.
The vodka sauce is based on my wife’s proprietary Carbone copycat recipe — something she’s modified herself and still hasn’t explained to me. Luckily, Carbone has a new cookbook out from Assouline if you’re looking for inspiration. I reached out to Assouline offering to interview the author, but still haven’t heard back so I can’t tell you how good the cookbook is, but they do appear to have the spicy rigatoni recipe in the book.
The beans were cooked up on their own. We used about half of the pot in the sauce. The rest we reserved and I turned into this delicious bean-y Italian-inspired salad the following night:
The beans soaked up the vodka sauce and then each serving was topped with toasted panko breadcrumbs for texture. If there’s one component of this meal that’s actually thrifty, it’s the toasted breadcrumbs.
Adding breadcrumbs to a pasta dish is a traditional technique, especially in the south of Italy. Neapolitan tomato sauces often have breadcrumbs added to help thicken the sauce and to extend the calories (a necessity for people who were literally starving), and even tomato-less pasta dishes like pasta con le sarde are topped with breadcrumbs.
The beans turned out to be a filling version of this dish even with the breadcrumbs, though. We also served it with fresh Italian bread, so in the end we did ate plenty of carbs .
The large size of the beans really helped make this a success, but if you were trying to replicate this with smaller beans, I suspect it would feel more like a sauce that was missing the pasta. That doesn’t mean I don’t think it would work, just that you probably need to serve with some pasta too.
Looking for a recipe on this one? Sure: cook your favorite spicy vodka sauce and beans separately. When both are finished, combine the sauce and the beans and top with breadcrumbs and parmigiana cheese.
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