Pasta and Meat Sauce with Ricotta Honey Flatbreads
current situation: spaghetti and Sapporo
Pasta with meat sauce, and then a plate of flatbreads with ricotta and honey next to it, which is the part worth copying.
Ricotta and honey on warm flatbread is the whole dessert and the side dish at once, it takes four minutes, and it is the thing people at the table ask about. Sweet, cold, soft against a hot savoury plate.
Short twisted pasta, not spaghetti, whatever I called it in the post. A chunky sauce needs shapes with grooves and corners for it to catch in — on long strands the meat all slides to the bottom of the bowl.
- Feeds
- 6
- Hands-on
- 25 minutes
- Flatbreads
- 4 minutes
- Needs
- Meat sauce
What you need
The pasta
- 1 1/2 lb short twisted pasta — casarecce, fusilli or gemelli
- 6 cups meat sauce
- Salt for the water — it should taste like the sea
- Grated parmesan
The ricotta flatbreads
- 6 flatbreads or naan
- 2 cups whole-milk ricotta
- 3 tbsp honey
- Olive oil
- Flaky salt
- Coarse black pepper
- Lemon zest, optional and good
How it goes
1 — Salt the water properly
A small handful per large pot. It is the only chance you get to season the pasta itself, and under-salted pasta cannot be rescued with sauce.
2 — Cook it two minutes short of the packet
It finishes in the pan with the sauce. Pasta boiled to done and then heated in sauce goes past done and loses its edge.
3 — Save a mug of pasta water before you drain
Starchy, cloudy and salty. It is what makes sauce cling to pasta instead of sitting around it in a puddle. Everyone forgets; set the mug by the colander now.
4 — Finish the pasta IN the sauce, two minutes
Drained pasta into the hot sauce with a splash of the water, tossed hard over heat for two minutes until the sauce tightens and coats every piece.
5 — Warm the flatbreads dry and fast
Straight onto a dry hot pan, ninety seconds a side, until they puff and blister. Warm, not crisp — they have to fold under the ricotta.
6 — Ricotta on thick, honey over, salt last
A heavy spread of cold ricotta onto the warm bread, honey drizzled in lines across it, a little olive oil, then flaky salt and black pepper.
pro tip — The salt over the honey is what stops it being a dessert. Do not leave it off.
7 — Serve them on the side, not under anything
Their own plate, beside the pasta. They are for tearing and eating between forkfuls, and they go soft if anything hot sits on them.
Spaghetti and Sapporo. The flatbreads were not planned and they will be next time. LFG.