Campanian kitchen · Quick
Pasta con ricotta e pomodoro: the quick lasagna
Lasagna takes three hours. This takes twenty minutes and makes the same argument.
There is a version of this idea that takes three hours: you make a béchamel, you make a ragù, you layer pasta sheets, you bake. That is lasagna and it is worth making when you have time.
This is what you make on a Tuesday when you want lasagna and have twenty minutes. The trick is using the hot tomato sauce to loosen the ricotta — stirring a ladleful of warm tomato into a bowl of fresh ricotta until it becomes a creamy, pale pink sauce with the temperature and body to coat pasta. You keep some red sauce separate for the top. The result looks and tastes like something more complicated than it is.
Curly pasta holds this sauce better than straight pasta. The riccioli or fusilli or any pasta with surface texture catches the cream in its curves. The messier the bowl, the better the argument that this is what you wanted.
A word from the lab
Fresh ricotta is made from the whey left over from cheese production — it contains whey proteins (primarily lactalbumin and lactoglobulin) that are among the most bioavailable proteins in the human diet. Whey protein has a particularly high concentration of leucine, the amino acid that most powerfully stimulates muscle protein synthesis. The fat in ricotta is predominantly saturated — palmitic and stearic acids — in a food matrix that also contains calcium, phosphorus, and riboflavin. Stearic acid, unlike most saturated fats, is converted in the liver to oleic acid and appears to have a neutral effect on LDL cholesterol. The tomato sauce provides lycopene; the olive oil makes it bioavailable.
Use fresh ricotta — not the shelf-stable kind. The texture and flavor are entirely different.
Ingredients · serves 2–3
Method
Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil. Add the pasta.
In a pan, warm the olive oil over medium heat. Add the onion and cook until soft. Add the tomato sauce and basil. Simmer for about 10 minutes.
Put the ricotta in a wide bowl. Add two or three ladlefuls of the hot tomato sauce and stir vigorously until you have a smooth, creamy pink sauce. Keep the remaining red sauce in the pan.
The ricotta should be warm and loose — add more sauce if it looks stiff.
Drain the pasta and toss with the ricotta cream sauce.
Plate, then add the remaining red sauce on top. Finish with Parmesan, black pepper, and a leaf of basil.
Buon appetito.