Wine, water and other secrets of a simple weeknight pasta dish

For all the myriad recipes I try to cook, it’s always the pasta that brings the most compliments. And, with few exceptions, that’s because of two things I almost invariably include: wine, and water. Yes, water. Cream, now and then, but a pasta sauce certainly does not have to be awash with cream.

That water in which you have just finished cooking your pasta until it is perfectly al dente – that is the secret to finishing a good pasta sauce, but white wine is the secret that comes first, so that it blesses all the other elements that are cooked with it. The starch in the pasta water helps emulsify and enrich the texture of the sauce.

The wine goes in relatively early on. If there’s going to be onion and garlic in my sauce, I’ll sauté them first, in olive oil, before adding a glass of sauvignon blanc or chenin or whatever white wine is to hand, and cook them down for a few minutes until it gets a bit syrupy. 

If mushrooms are in the recipe, there most likely won’t be any tomato, so the sliced mushrooms will follow the onions into the saucepan. (I’m not a fan of mushrooms and tomatoes in the same mix, they both lose something when in company with the other, and neither gains anything.) I don’t add cream to many pasta sauces, but I would if mushrooms were the hero ingredient, so that would go in next. Mushrooms and cream are one of the magic marriages of the kitchen.

But it’s most often pasta water that “marries” my pasta sauces, outside of cooking with mushrooms. 

The pasta section of my kitchen cupboards invariably has half full packets of this or that pasta, and for two of us, half a packet of pasta is more than enough. So, I’ll have a look to see what pasta we have, then check the fridge for fresh vegetables or perhaps jars of olives, capers and the like. A few courgettes make a good starting point, and I had bought some sugarsnap peas. That pair, with some perky, bright red roma tomatoes, would make a simple pasta sauce with some veggie substance in it, although I am not at all averse to a pasta sauce with not “bits” in at all.

There might be ham or bacon in the fridge, and both are lovely in a pasta sauce. And they go with almost anything.

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