Let’s see how it went this time.

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After a rather successful attempt at homemade fresh pasta, i did it again. This time i used only high gluten flour, hoping for more al dente result. It turned out not bad but i am still hoping for more chewy texture. So sound like i will try again soon.

The weather is warming up rapidly in Japan and nice tomatoes with reasonable price started to occupy the supermarket front, since tomato is summer vegetable(technically it is a fruit…). So after garlic oil based sauce last time i decided to use tomato today. My brothers and I started really got into cooking when we were teenagers and since then i never did tomato pasta using canned sauce.

The crucial ingredient to bring tomato pasta sauce alive is sun dried tomato. I learned that in adulthood. Before i would use a small amount of ketchup to bring the sauce closer to those in restaurants, without knowing the actual trick. I am not sure if eggplant is something common in authentic Italian pasta cooking but in Japan it is common. Thinking about it, Japanese put eggplants on pizza too.

I cooked with the usual steps of pan frying bacon, onion, mushrooms then add in sun dried tomato with some of its oil, stirred until the fragrance were brought out before adding in diced tomato. After the diced tomato were slightly grilled, i poured in some wine, then seasoned it to taste with salt, pepper and sugar. Be careful not to overdo on salt here because the pasta water will be added later and that has salt in it.

Capellini were cooked on the side very briefly as the second part of the cooking would be completed in the sauce. Along the pasta, pasta water were added to the sauce. Next i had chopped parsley, green leaves and pre-grilled eggplants mixed in. Once the pasta water were reduced and incorporated with the sauce, it was ready to be served.

Of course, i would always grate some nice parmigiano reggiano for the final touch. A glass of wine would be great but since work starts tomorrow i had to give up on that sadly. This marked the end of the Golden week holiday 2020.