This story is part of On Repeat, a series in which we ask top chefs, cookbook authors, and other famous foodies about the dishes they just can’t quit.
Today we’re chatting about pasta puttanesca with Karen Akunowicz, chef-owner of Boston’s Fox & the Knife Enoteca and Bar Volpe Ristorante and Beantown’s reigning Queen of Pasta. Akunowicz actually credits puttanesca—a brazenly briny, caper-studded affair—with sparking her culinary career.
“I had a date coming over—I’d been trying to get her to go out with me for a really long time, and finally I offered to cook for her,” Akunowicz tells us. “At that point in time I really couldn’t cook.” So she bought a book, chose the recipe, and got started. “I remember how it smelled, and thinking, Oh my God, this is magic. I’m actually doing magic right now.”
Many years and a James Beard Award later, Akunowicz made sure spaghetti alla puttanesca—a simple Neapolitan dish traditionally made with anchovies, garlic, olives, capers, and canned tomatoes—had prime placement in her cookbook, Crave. It’s one of many plant-based dishes in the book, and in her restaurants. “I’m married to a vegetarian, so for 12 years half of what I cook is plant-based,” she says, “and we make sure that at the restaurants those dishes are represented in a meaningful way: They’re not just a side dish or a throwaway.”
Why I love it
“I love to eat pasta as much as I love to make it. Puttanesca is quick and easy and so vibrant, and I almost always have all of the ingredients on hand. I almost always have crushed tomatoes in my cabinet, and capers, and olives, and spaghetti, and olive oil. These are pantry ingredients, right? So I’m almost never saying, ‘Oh my gosh I can’t make that, I have to go to the store.’
“This is a dish that I can make almost any night of the week. It’s intensely comforting for me. It’s delicious, and it never gets old. Every time I taste it, I think it’s a perfect symphony of flavors and textures.”
What I’ve changed
“Typically there are chopped anchovies in puttanesca, but I substitute fish sauce. What we’re looking for when we talk about anchovies, we’re really talking about the umami that anchovies bring. You could substitute a little bit of soy sauce, and it would still give you the umami. You could also take a little bit of white miso—we’re talking like half a teaspoon—and add that to the olive oil with the garlic, and you are going to get all of that flavor that you can get from the fish sauce.
“You could add chickpeas; that would be a great way to add a little more substance to the dish. And, because you don’t want them just kind of rolling around the dishes, I would throw them into a food processor and give them like two pulses, or just maybe chop ’em a little bit with a knife, so that they incorporate better in the pasta.”
Plus: My favorite planet-friendly practices
- Doing our stretches. “At home and in the restaurant, we want to make sure that we’re utilizing everything and getting our money’s worth. One of our signature dishes is a grilled broccoli Caesar salad: We grill broccoli and we also take the stems and shave them raw so they add a crunchy component to the dish. At home I’ll shave the stalks for salads, and I take [any extra] stalks and florets and make a really simple broccoli-potato soup.”
- Making whey more. “One of the most loved dishes on the menu at Fox & the Knife is our house-made ricotta. When we started making it, we had so much whey left over, so I was looking for different ways to use it. We had a pork Milanese on the menu, and I said, ‘What if instead of brining the pork in buttermilk, we used whey?’ It’s a perfect way to utilize that byproduct.”
This article originally appeared in the
Cool Beans newsletter.
Read the whole story here.