Every August or September, Goomba Joe, who I wrote about in these pages regarding his meatballs (Goomba Joe’s Polpette), would invite my family up to his apartment for dinner where one of the courses would undoubtedly be what he called “pasta crudo,” or tomato sauce in the raw. He had a small terrace where, with limited sun, he grew enough tomatoes for a few batches of this uncooked tomato sauce.
Goomba Joe is sadly gone, though now my family has a spacious sunny terrace where, using planters, we can usually grow enough tomatoes for more than just a few batches of pasta crudo. This year because of, let’s see, a cool spring, too much rain, a brutally hot early July followed by a cool August, culminating with an invasion of tomato hornworms—or any other excuse I can come up with—the terrace tomato crop has been paltry . As of this writing, however, they are making a strong late season comeback and their bounty has yielded enough for at least one good batch of pasta crudo.
The hornworms like their tomatoes raw.
There really isn’t much to making uncooked tomato sauce. If your tomatoes are ripe, in season summer tomatoes, you can’t go wrong. The sauce is not exclusive to pasta. It can be used as an Italian salsa or, even better, slathered on crusty bread as a bruschetta topping.
The ingredients are few:
3-4 baseball-sized ripe (but not overripe) tomatoes, chopped
1-2 thinly sliced cloves of garlic*
¾ cup of basil torn into pieces
½ cup of olive oil
1 teaspoon of sea salt
Crushed red pepper to taste
Parmesean Reggiano to taste
1lb of fusilli, rotini, or spaghetti
Put the chopped tomatoes into a non-reactive bowl (glass or ceramic).
Add all the other ingredients and mix delicately with a spoon.
Let the sauce sit or “macerate” for at least one hour. The tomato sauce can sit at room temperature for up to eight hours, any longer I recommend refrigerating and then pulling them out of the refrigerator at least an hour before serving.
Meanwhile cook one pound of pasta. For this, I used fusilli, but spaghetti works well too.
When the pasta is al dente, drain and add the sauce, mixing well.
Sprinkle generously with grated Parmesean Reggiano or Pecorino Romano.
Tomato sauce in the raw.
*If you have an aversion to raw garlic even though it has softened during the maceration process from the salt and the acid from the tomatoes, slice or chop it into bigger pieces before adding it to the sauce and then remove it just before serving. Why you would do this, I don’t know.
Fried Neck Bones...and some home fries 