Giada De Laurentiis Just Taught Me Her “Burnt Pasta” Hack, and It's Brilliant
As a food writer, I’ve perfected a few quick and easy recipes that I make regularly, like coconut chickpea stew or cheesy carbonara. But one dish I never seem to crave during the week is pasta with tomato sauce. Even though it’s a simple, two-ingredient meal (especially if you’re using jarred sauce), it just doesn’t excite me. That is, until I discovered a game-changing trick from Giada De Laurentiis that takes it to a whole new level.
“This pasta is crunchy,” De Laurentiis says in a recent Instagram clip. “It will totally revolutionize the way you cook pasta.” She then demonstrates how to make pasta Assassina, an Italian dish where you skip boiling the noodles and instead sauté them in a pan to give them a crispy, crunchy texture.
Here’s how to make “burnt pasta,” as she calls it: Start by heating olive oil in a pan with a few garlic cloves and some tomato purée or sauce. Next, add a handful of spaghetti and toss it in the sauce. De Laurentiis recommends cooking the pasta until it’s nearly burnt — aim for a caramelized, crispy texture. Once the noodles begin to brown, gradually add tomato sauce-infused water, “risotto-style,” she notes, meaning you add a little bit of liquid at a time while stirring constantly. Continue until the pasta absorbs enough broth and reaches an al dente texture, then remove it from the heat and serve.
People quickly flooded the comments on De Laurentiis’ burnt pasta Instagram tutorial to share their excitement. One person wrote, “That looks sooooo amazing,” while another commented, “Can’t wait to try this one!”
If you end up enjoying your pasta with an extra caramelized, crunchy texture, you can use De Laurentiis’ technique with other recipes as well. Try it with a pesto, vodka, or butternut squash sauce, and it’ll add more depth of flavor to your meals.
I, for one, can’t wait to try this hack. Giada promises that the result will be “a spaghetti like no other with spicy, rich flavor — the noodles are soft and spicy in certain places and then crispy and charred in others, and every bite has this incredible depth of tomato goodness.”
Further Reading
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