at Mon, 19 Sep 2005 01:14:43 GMT in <432e117a.38890931@news-
server.nyc.rr.com>, (Curly Sue) wrote :

>I made a sauce by simmering heavy cream to reduce it a bit, then
>adding pesto. After additing it to the cooked pasta (vermicelli), I
>thought I'd added too much because it looked somewhat soupy. However,
>as I mixed, the pasta absorbed the cream and it looked dry. I added
>more. It absorbed it all. It tasted fine, though a bit softer
>than al dente, but I wanted a basil cream sauce!
>
>How can I stop the pasta from absorbing the cream? Or can't I?

Don't stir in the sauce before bringing it to the table. Pour the sauce on
top literally at the last possible minute before serving and then let
people tableside stir it in with forks to their hearts' content.

Also, don't cook the pasta for very long. It should be *really* al dente
when you remove it, thus only *just* not crunchy in the center. The only
way to tell this beforehand is by taste-testing as the pasta cooks.

The more sauce you add, the bigger trouble you'll find yourself in, as you
discovered. Pasta should be served with a pretty minimal amount of sauce.
It should not cover the pasta like a pizza - you want much less - something
where perhaps on a pile of pasta only 1/3 of the pile is covered when the
sauce is initially added.

Reduced heavy cream and pesto together will make for a very, very thick
sauce indeed. As you've now also discovered, cream sauces still should be
relatively thin. This is especially true for vermicelli. In general, the
thinner the diameter, the thinner the sauce needs to be. So capellini
should be extremely thin, indeed watery, vermicelli perhaps the thickness
of unreduced cream, spaghettini like double cream, spaghetti close to
pouring custard. Sauces that approach some sort of solidity at all are too
thick by far.

I'd have avoided the pesto and instead infused fresh basil directly into
the cream. I might in fact have started with half and half to get the
consistency to be right.


--
Alex Rast

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