This recipe for Rigatoni Pomodoro is the absolute easiest and quickest way to cook up delicious fresh tomato sauce for pasta. Perfect for weeknight dinners or hot summer lunches.
What is luxury in life? Well, one of them is home-grown tomatoes. You can’t beat the amazing flavor. The difference is astounding.
Late summer is prime tomato season, when tomatoes are at their reddest, their sweetest, their juiciest! On generous harvest years, at the absolute perfect time, a generous friend who toils a beautiful Mediterranean vegetable garden (orto) by the sea for the love of it, bestows on us a bunch of his tomatoes. Among the crates are big, red, lush heirloom tomatoes, (sometimes called chilotti in Italian, because they look like they weigh a kilo) and dozens upon dozens of sauce-tomatoes (pomodori da salsa). Here’s what we do with a lot of them: we make rigatoni pomodoro!
Making Fresh Tomato Rigatoni Pomodoro
We tend to take full advantage of prime tomato season every year, and usually in pretty relaxed ways. It’s summer, it’s hot. Our energy is low. We love enjoying a nice plate of fresh summer tomato pasta, that is as quick and easy to prepare as it is delicious.
In short, to make it, just grate some fresh ripe tomatoes, cook them a few minutes in olive oil, add a basil leaf or two. Meanwhile your pasta has been cooking. Add some grated cheese, or the favorite at our house: ground almonds. It’s time to eat. That fast? Yep! Buon Appetito!
The Tool of Choice? The Grater
Grating tomatoes is absolutely the easiest and quickest way to make fresh tomato sauce. And the texture of grated tomatoes is already a perfect sauce. (You could even add them to the pasta raw if you like — though cooking tomatoes does boost beneficial phytochemical levels.)
We’ll have fresh tomato sauce for our rigatoni pomodoro in no time — in the same 15 minutes that it takes to cook the pasta — without getting out nor having to clean the food processor, without peeling or chopping tomatoes, without straining, nor having to transfer them to a food mill or strainer. I like this.
And you keep all of the nutrients and flavor from the tomato skins and seeds, but without the texture contrast that you get with the skins of chopped tomatoes. While I don’t mind that so much, the contrast of thick tomato skins in a smooth sauce is a deal breaker for Francesco. Not here! Grated tomato pasta sauce is an all around win.
Any box grater should do just fine, using the side with the biggest graters. (The one I’m using here in the photo is this Microplane grater.)
Tomatoes for Sauce
The perfect sauce tomato, is acidic, but not too acidic, sweet, but not too sweet, and has more dense, meaty pulp and less water. San Marzano tomatoes (we use canned ones in our penne pomodoro recipe), is one of the most famous pomodori da salsa, originating in Italy south of Mount Vesuvius. The Roma tomato is an American tomato based on the San Marzano, but you would never know it. There are others, as well. Any elongated, oval or non-round shaped tomato is basically a trigger for making tomato sauce. The locally grown, ripe, tomatoes of summer are best.
Why not to use all your biggest, juiciest sweetest, reddest heirloom tomatoes for your pasta sauce (with one exception)
Italy has a cute nickname for huge heritage tomatoes: chilotti — or 2-pounders for us, since we never did switch over to the metric system’s kilos, as our elementary schools forcasted every year. (Any year now!) These big red juicy tomatoes are considered pomodori da tavola in Italy — tomatoes to eat at the table.
So, save maybe one of your big, sweet, red, heirloom tomatoes for this sauce, and enjoy the rest at the table:
- Enjoy them simply cut into wedges with a little fruity olive oil, salt and pepper.
- Or with basil and buffalo mozzarella.
- And don’t forget bruschetta!
- Or when you have an heirloom that is so juicy ripe, and good, that it reminds you that tomatoes are actually a fruit: eat it handheld like a peach, like an old timer sitting next to us did, one morning at the Santa Fe farmer’s market (while my mother and I indulged on pastries).
Why though not on pasta? The superior flavor of those big red ripe heirloom tomatoes can actually be too sweet for pasta. It’s almost like eating a pasta dessert. They can also lack the acidity needed for pasta sauce. And they aren’t that easy to grate.
A firmer sauce-tomato is easier to grate, and has more favorable acidity for pasta sauce. A final consideration is how heirlooms can be quite expensive for a sauce-tomato. In general, we save our heirloom tomatoes for other delights.
The only exception is to add an heirloom in with your sauce-tomatoes. Just one (for 2 servings)—to give a kick of sweetness to your tomato sauce. It’s actually one of the secret tomato corrections below. Try it and see if it creates the perfect balance.
Tomato Correction Secrets
Every great Italian home cook I’ve known has had a bag of secret tricks to correct sauce with tomato “issues.” These are usually not the home grown or farmer’s market tomatoes. When you can’t find as good of tomatoes as you’d like, it helps to have a few tricks up your sleeve:
- If you taste and find the tomatoes are a little flat, try adding acidity to the sauce with:
- A squeeze of lemon, a touch of white wine vinegar, or a teaspoon of milk. With any of these, start out very small, then taste and adjust.
- If the tomatoes taste quite tart or a little green — overly acidic:
- Try a tiny pinch of baking soda (Because it’s alkaline, baking soda is the perfect counterbalance to acidity.) Just make sure you add it at the same time that you start to cook the sauce, so that it has time to do its work and disappear.
- Try adding a super sweet tomato variety, to balance the overly acidic ones.
- A common secret that adds a bit of sweetness (but doesn’t chemically counteract the acidity — so you may want to add baking soda as well) is to add a tiny pinch of sugar. Attention, don’t over do it — you can easily ruin your pasta dish here! (And do this sneaking around on your tiptoes — no one must know!)
Great Pasta
Like many simple dishes of the Mediterranean, we rely on each ingredient to add quality to the dish. We need a dried rigatoni pasta with a great bite! One that will cook up al dente, perfect to the bite, with a firm, dense, chewy texture. Check out tips on buying good dried pasta, in my Italian Broccoli Pasta recipe, including what to look for in a great pasta, great brands, and ones I often stock.
Recommended Rigatoni Substitutions
Rigatoni is our favorite with this fresh tomato pasta al pomodoro. Tortiglioni, basically twisted rigatoni, are another of our go-tos. And if you like to twirl, there’s always spaghetti.
Grated Cheese or Almond Flour
Typically in Italy, cheese is grated on top, or even stirred into the sauce. Parmigiano or Grana Padano are favorites. Grated Ricotta Salata (Hard Salted Ricotta), or globs of creamy tangy stracchino are also excellent.
However, we also love almond flour (almond meal), and use it the majority of the time in all of our tomato pasta recipes. We started out years ago on an epiphany, and have craved its beautiful taste and creaminess ever since.
Almond Flour in Tomato Sauce is Divine!
Fine almond flour, or almond meal, serves the same purpose as cheeses, like Parmigiano or Grana Padano, for adding to a pasta dish, adding creaminess and richness to the sauce, as well as texture sprinkled on top. With this freshly grated tomato basil pasta recipe, almond flour is perfect. It also happens to be lactose-free and vegan.
Having a canister of almond flour in-house is convenient. We either use super-fine almond flour from blanched whole almonds (usually Bob’s Red Mill Almond Flour), or make it ourselves (simple instructions for how to make almond flour).
Recipe
Ingredients
- 6 ripe tomatoes (about 1 lb, 450 g) (see notes)
- 8 oz (½ lb) rigatoni pasta
- 3 Tbsp extra virgin olive oil of good quality
- ¼ tsp kosher salt or table sea salt
- 10 fresh basil leaves, torn into pieces if large
Optional
- 4 Tbsp (¼ cup) almond flour (instead of cheese), peeled/blanched and superfine or fine, plus more for sprinkling on top
- cheese or (instead of almond flour, see notes)
Instructions
- Bring a large covered pot of salted water to a rolling boil.
- Meanwhile, grate the tomatoes into a large sauté pan with a coarse grater.
- When the pasta water comes to a boil, cook the pasta in the salted water, stirring occasionally, until al dente, tender yet still firm to the bite.
- Meanwhile, cook the grated tomatoes, uncovered over medium low heat, stirring occasionally, for about 10 minutes, or until all water is evaporated.
- Stir in the olive oil and salt. If using almond flour, stir it in now, which will make the sauce creamy. Turn off the heat.
- Drain the pasta, and stir it into the sauce. (Drizzle in a little more extra virgin olive oil, if you've got the good stuff.) Taste and adjust for salt. Then, gently stir in the basil.
- Optional: To serve, sprinkle with almond flour, if using, or the grated or crumbled cheese of your choice.Enjoy! Buon appetito!
Notes
- Tomatoes: Some tomatoes are better for sauce than others. In Italy, generally any of the non-round varieties are favored.
- Great Cheese Options for Topping: freshly grated Parmigiano Reggiano, grated ricotta salata (hard salted ricotta), crumbled feta cheese, or globs of stracchino
Nutrition Info: Click to Expand
Nutrition Info for Optional Ingredients:
- 2 Tbsp Almond Meal adds: Cal: 140 | Carbs: 5g | Fat: 12g | Protein: 5g | Calcium: 53mg
- 2 Tbsp Parmigiano Reggiano cheese adds: Cal: 78 | Carbs: 2g | Fat: 6g | Protein: 8g | Calcium: 236mg
