Rigatoni with Easy Vodka Sauce

Pasta alla vodka was never part of my Italian-American-restaurant repertoire as a kid — I’d go for the aglio e olio instead (or, if given the opportunity, a cheese calzone with a dish of marinara for dunking). As an adult, though, vodka sauce speaks to me: creamy, spicy, tomatoey, and a bump up from macaroni and cheese and arguably easier to make. I wanted a version that was creamy without being heavy or gloppy, rich without being cheese-laden, and with a deep, intense tomato flavor. Keep a spot in your heart for your local red-sauce standby’s vodka sauce — but try this one, too.

The sauce starts with yellow onion, which you’ll mince especially finely to keep the sauce’s texture creamy rather than chunky (you could even pulse the onion until very finely chopped in the food processor). The onion, along with the garlic and chile flakes, are added to cold, not preheated, olive oil to keep the aromatics from burning — and infuse the oil with flavor and heat as they soften.

To get a super-tomatoey flavor without having to wait and wait for canned or fresh tomatoes to reduce, you’ll add a can of tomato paste to the hot oil (later, you’ll add starchy, clingy pasta-cooking water to thin the sauce until it coats the pasta). Sauté the paste in the oil until it’s blushed several shades deeper, caramelizing the sugars, and then it’s time for that eponymous vodka, which doesn’t just deglaze the tomatoey pan — it gives a sharpness and a sweetness to the sauce and, working in its mysterious ways, helps to emphasize the tomato flavor, like adding a handful of exclamation points.

What about the requisite creaminess? Here, we’re skipping the usual heavy cream in favor of crème fraîche and stirring it right into the caramelized tomato mixture. Tangy and buttery, crème fraîche is hardly part of the Italian larder, but it sings here, melting easily into the tomato mixture and lending velvety-ness without diluting the intensity of the tomato flavor in the way cream would. 

And even before you started all this sauce, you cooked the pasta to a couple of minutes shy of al dente, and it’s waiting for you in a colander by the sink. Add some of that pasta water you reserved, fold in the pasta, and cook until the pasta’s tender — it’ll soak up some of the sauce as it goes.