This is part of a new series on cooking and cuisine my husband John and I are doing. If you prefer your food blogging straight up with no Star Trek chaser, check out our Posterous blog, Chicken Feet & Clam Chowdah.

I try to cook like this dude. Toolishness ensues.

On the heels of our very successful attempt at making the French fries Anthony Bourdain featured on the “Techniques” episode of No Reservations, John and I decided to try the pasta with red sauce Scott Conant made on that same episode. The results were mixed: The sauce we made was extremely tasty, but the recipe didn’t make nearly enough to coat the amount of pasta it called for. I’m guessing that Conant cooks the way my father-in-law does a lot of the time—without using a recipe or measuring, as he’s so familiar with what goes in each dish he can do it by memory alone. That’s a great trait for a chef, but it doesn’t always translate well when scaling down a recipe for a home kitchen. Sometimes Conant seemed to be describing the way he’d make the dish for restaurant use, making figuring out the proportions a little tricky.

One problem we had, for instance, was that Conant didn’t specify the amount of tomatoes needed during the TV segment, so we turned to the similar-but-not-identical recipe posted on the Travel Channel website, and used the 20 plum tomatoes and 1 pound of pasta that recipe called for.

The technique of blanching the tomatoes and then plunging them in ice water worked well, though I think the tomatoes could have stayed in the boiling water a little longer than the 15 seconds the recipe recommended.

Once in the saucepan, that big pile of tomatoes reduced waaaaay down to about three-quarters of an inch of funky-looking, delicious-smelling tomato sludge that in no way resembled the thick, rich, deep red saucy sauce Conant had going at this point in the recipe. I’m guessing he used a lot more tomatoes than I did. His also looked to have more fluid in them, even though he squeezed them beforehand. Next time we try this, I’d probably double the amount of tomatoes and just take the seeds out without squeezing out the juice to try and get a more fluid consistency.

40 minutes also seems like too long to cook the tomatoes—mine were as soft and pulpy as they were going to get about 20 minutes in (which is what the online recipe recommended anyway).

I infused 2 cups of olive oil with the basil, garlic, and crushed red pepper as shown on the episode. From the TV segment, it was hard to tell how much of that oil Conant put in the tomatoes. It looked like all of it, but that seems like a ton of olive oil unless you’re making a mecha chef-size potful. The online recipe called for 1/3 cup of oil, which sounded a lot more reasonable . (Plus, if I added 2 cups of oil to my tomato sludge, I’d wind up with oil with some tomato bits floating in it.)

My oily tomato sludge

Here I missed an essential step. I combined the tomatoes and the infused olive oil in a sauté pan instead of in the saucepan, and then tried to put as much of the pasta as I could into the saucepan to finish cooking. Only about 2/3 of a pound of pasta would fit in my pan that way, and it was impossible to flip. And, despite the fact that the sauce looked awfully oily, pasta still managed to stick to the bottom of the pan. After rewatching the segment, I found that Conant was finishing the pasta in individual portions, adding only 4 oz. of pasta and 6 oz. of sauce to the sauté pan at a time. D’oh!

The result came out tasting less like ‘pasta with red sauce’ than ‘pasta with an insufficient quantity of deliciously seasoned tomatoes.’ The bulk of the pasta tasted like olive oil with a little hint of flavor, though every so often I’d get an especially tomatoey bite. But those few tomatoey bites were delectable: bright and fresh-tasting, redolent of garlic, basil, and olives, like a burst of Italian sunshine. (And this with anemic April tomatoes, too!) They were enough to convince me that I need to try this recipe again—and get it right this time.

The finished product.

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