DIY Dinners: La Tua Pasta
Guess what?! Absolutely nothing changed a fortnight ago, and navigating life in 2021 is just as mind-numbingly, eyeball-gougingly difficult as it has been for the last 10 months! Whodathunk, eh?!?
When I started writing about “DIY Dinners” on Pasghetti & Momatoes, I figured I’d be popping up a few interim posts about heat-at-home kits to muddle through Lockdown 2.0, before embarking on my highly anticipated 60-date Comeback Tour of London’s restaurants (highly anticipated by, err, me).
A new lockdown has put a stop to that, along with much of the tentatively germinating hope that came with the new year. Today, I am in a terrible mood. Like, monumentally bad. I’m properly angry at the whole world right now.
So, I’ve come here to talk about joy.
This La Tua Pasta delivery also arrived on another day when I was in a bad mood. Work wasn’t going so well, I had period cramps and, you know, there’s a deadly virus outside destroying lives and livelihoods etc.
When there was a knock on the door, I didn’t want to get up to open it. My dad returned to the kitchen with a huggably large cardboard box with “pasta” written on the side of it. I jumped up, and ripped it open to find it stuffed with tortelloni, tagliatelle, sauces, cheese and bread.
I went from being a hormonal laptop-hunchback to a kid on Christmas morning within 30 seconds, instantly enraptured with all the building blocks of my new edible Lego set; pairing parmesan and breadcrumb pots with the correct pasta, calculating when best to eat the focaccia, and wondering if I could get out of sharing any of it.
At the bottom of the box was a white tub filled with something sloshing precariously inside. Then, I remembered: the stracciatella. Stracciatella cheese is, in effect, the inside bit of a burrata i.e. the best bit of one of the best things in the world. A whole tub of stracciatella. Which needed to be eaten soon. By me. I think I squeaked.
Cheese please: Stracciatella from La Latteria
La Tua Pasta is a company that has been making fresh pasta for sale in Borough Market since 2006. Last year, they opened a second location there selling hot pasta to go, while lockdown has seen them really ramp up their online delivery offering.
I kicked off the evening with the stracciatella, which I quickly realised was a product of La Latteria, a London-based mozzarella producer whose cheeses I had enjoyed before at restaurants in the city. Draped generously over toasted brown sourdough with a splash of olive oil and a crunch of pepper, it was sublime – creamy but effortlessly light, its bulk going only so far as to facilitate fluffy strands of solid cheese swimming amid drinkable juices.
If you’ve been watching Nigella Lawson’s ‘Cook. Eat. Repeat’ recently, you’ll know that it is now absolutely fine for your pasta sauce to come out of a jar. For anyone who thought her ‘nduja pasta looked like far too much work (chop your own veg? Hell no.), La Tua Pasta’s Calabrian sausage ragu is the Dolmio of dreams. A light, white wine-based tomato sauce is set alight with chilli, given aromatic bite with fennel seeds and depth from the meat of the region’s black pigs. No, I have not given up my “Pescatarian For January” experiment already – this package arrived in December – but writing about this sauce has me severely tempted. The final flourish of the Italian forest comes from the suggested pairing of chestnut tagliatelle, a wonderfully nutty alternative that I want to try again with a more minimal sauce to let it really do its thing.
With two types of tortelloni at my disposal, we plump for the crab and lobster portion first, wrapped in lemon butter with a scattering of pangrattato on top. The Devonshire crab gets a proper showcase here, with the under-used brown meat whipped into the ricotta mix for umami oomph, and the white meat matching delicate salinity to the lobster’s sweetness.
Gone swimming: Burrata and truffle tortelloni
For lunch in the following days, a portion of tortelloni filled with burrata and truffle. I am, inexplicably, not a huge fan of cheese-filled pastas (is it a texture thing? I think it’s a texture thing), but I wholly endorse anything swimming in truffle butter. This portion was little denser than its seafood counterpart, but a sheen of this nutty fat gave it appropriate depth. The focaccia was indeed left until this day: not as raucously bubbly as I like mine, but it got a pleasing golden crackle on after a few minutes of oven warming.
Joy can be difficult to come by these days. The world is a hard place at the moment, and so many of us are cut off from the things and people that make it softer.
We can’t do much that we want to do – but what we need to do, quite imperatively, is eat.
As you know, countless food businesses (restaurants, suppliers, market stalls) have pivoted to delivery to counter the unprecedented effects of lockdown. Last night, I drank bottled cocktails from Adam Handling’s Eve Bar, got a bit drunk, made Tommy Banks’s recipe for fish pie and laughed a lot about Limp Bizkit with my family. After a difficult week, it was the best night I’ve had in some time.
These companies are not just dropping off dinner on your doorstep – they’re delivering that little spark of delight you really, really deserve right now.
This DIY kit was supplied as a complimentary press sample.
For more information, visit latuapasta.com
