Lushy Noodles

Lushy noodles (Bucatini and Bacon)

If you have 20 minutes to spare and a functional attention span, give this Serious Eats Food Lab article a read. I'd love to know what it says. I have a feeling it's relevant to this post though, because cooking pasta may be the most challenging part of this recipe. It's easily the most critical component of the dish.

Here's the premise: make a tomato sauce, saute some bacon, combine the two, and then cook the pasta for its last two minutes in the tomato-bacon juice. You'll end up with succulent noodles, drunk with rich, fragrant, tomato flavor, stumbling through a maze of slightly crispy, but equally inebriated, chunks of pork.

The wholly non-tragic tragedy of using Oscar Meyer bacon.

Ideally, you'd use a pork product that isn't as in-your-face as Oscar Meyer Thick-Cut Bacon. I'll admit bacon hogs the spotlight pretty obnoxiously, but who are we kidding, we keep buying tickets to the show. If you can get your hands on good imported pancetta, the kind you'd ask the deliman to slice a single, 1/2 lb. ring off for you, that's what you're in the market for - well, actually what you really want is guanciale (ie. "face bacon") - an apparently prevalent cut of pig outside the northeast US.

Chunked guanciale from Buon Italia.

Guanciale is cured pork meat from the cheeks or jowls of the pig. People go nuts for this stuff for good reason, each little bite packs a haymaker punch of porkiness, it's like concentrating a 500 pound pig's worth of porkiness into a couple ounces of meat. I find the Italian Market at Chelsea Markets to be the best place to purchase it, as chunks of vacuum-sealed guanciale chill out unassumingly in easy-access baskets. If you're forced to pronounce it, go with "gwan-cha-lay."

Once it hits your lips! It's so good! It's so good!

So about this lushy noodle bit: your goal is to create a thin tomato juice that your pasta can be immersed in right before serving. The noodles will chug the tomato sauce without abandon, the pasta equivalent of shotgunning a beer, the fratboy equivalent of doing a fully-clothed swan dive off a balcony into your neighbor's new pond. In just a couple minutes, the pasta will glow deep orange, infused with flavor, studded with decadent little bubbles of pork fat and deeply-concentrated tomato essence. You don't need cheese with this pasta, you don't need a swig of olive oil, you don't even need a drink - because you'll finish this plate in no time, and by all earthly measures, you will have died. Enjoy!

Bucatini with Bacon
Serves 2

4 cloves garlic
Fresh basil
1 large sweet onion (like Vidalia)
4 tbsp. extra virgin olive oil
28 oz. can peeled tomatoes (Nina, San Marzano, Luigi Vitelli, etc.) 
Kosher salt
Cracked black pepper
1 tbsp. sugar
1/2 lb. thick cut bacon (about 12 oz pancetta/guanciale)
1/2 lb. bucatini (or thick spaghetti)

Peel the garlic cloves, squash them a little, chop the onion roughly, and tear up some basil leaves. These ingredients won't appear in the final dish, they're only flavoring the sauce (so they don't have to be cut perfectly). Heat up a medium sauce pot, add the extra virgin olive oil followed by the garlic, onions, and basil. Add about a tbsp of salt to the mixture and mix well. Cook the ingredients over medium-high heat until translucent and reduced, about ten minutes.

Meanwhile, pour the peeled tomatoes into a bowl and gently break them apart with your hands (watch for squirters!), discarding anything unusually tough or discolored. After the vegetables cook down, add the tomatoes to the sauce pot. Add salt and pepper to taste. Add the sugar. Cook the sauce, uncovered, for 30 minutes at a very slow simmer.

Slice your pork about half an inch wide. Heat up a saute pan and add the pork. Cook over medium heat until the edges crisp, then turn the heat down to its lowest setting.

After 30 minutes, place a strainer over a different sauce pot (you may want to do this step over a sink). Pour the tomato sauce into the strainer, and with the back of a spoon, press as much of the liquid out of the sauce as you can, through the strainer, and into the bottom pot. Put the clear tomato juice on the stove over high heat and bring to a vigorous boil.

Bring aggressively-salted water to a boil for your pasta. Add the pasta. After five minutes, begin checking the pasta for tenderness every 30 seconds. Once it's just tender, but still essentially inedible, it's go-time. Pour the tomato juice into the bacon saute pan, and turn the heat up to medium. Using tongs, transfer the noodles from the pot to the saute pan and stir well. Cook the noodles about 2 minutes, stirring.

Transfer the pasta to serving bowls with a circular flourish (it's all in the wrist), make sure to distribute the pork evenly, and garnish with a hearty sprig of pretty basil leaves.

They're all wasted.