Vincenzo’s Plate
Facebook veered out of Korean breakfast sandwiches and street food into right-wing angry-making suggested posts for a while, and then they hit the news for destroying democracy again and suddenly I was back to cooking videos. One of the more popular sets to appear on my feed is Vincenzo’s Plate.
The gimmick is that the dude is Italian and tries to emphasizes authentic Italian ways of making things rather than Italian-American approaches. He also likes to slag on Gordon Ramsey, which I suspect is what made him popular. (And he has a decent balance of “No, don’t do that, it hurts me,” with “I wouldn’t do that, but it’ll probably taste good,” in his reaction videos.)
He makes a lot of pasta and tends to emphasize pasta-cooking tips Americans ignore: Salting the water (but not adding oil); making sure to cook pasta in a big pot and lots of water; saving pasta water for combining the pasta and sauce; and combining the pasta and sauce immediately after cooking.
I went ahead and tried making his basic tomato sauce and his fettuccine alfredo, both of which see some major departures from my standard: The tomato sauce involves pureeing carrots, celery and onions (sofrito), sautéing them in olive oil, adding pureed (high-quality) tomatoes, cooking until thick, and then adding basil when the heat is off. No garlic! It was a very nice sauce, very simple with a good body to it. I’ll probably build on it (including adding garlic, and possibly putting pancetta and anchovies in that sofrito) in the future, but I need to remember things like tearing in the basil at the end.
The alfredo was a traditional Italian version, which doesn’t involve cream or any thickeners. Half a pound of fresh pasta, a stick of butter, two cups of shredded two-year-aged pecorino. Toss the pasta in the butter, add the cheese, add enough pasta water to make it creamy, add pepper to taste at the table, and that’s it. It was really tasty, though a different food in a lot of ways from the American version: It’s definitely a side dish, not a main course (I served it with grilled fish and salad); and I wouldn’t try to add chicken or peas or any of my standard alfredo mix-ins to it. I’ll likely make this again, but mix it up with the American version.
(In both cases, the key is really just “Use good ingredients, keep it simple.”)
Overall: I’ll likely try a bunch of his other recipes if the videos catch my eye, but this guy is entertaining and the two recipes I tried definitely work.
The gimmick is that the dude is Italian and tries to emphasizes authentic Italian ways of making things rather than Italian-American approaches. He also likes to slag on Gordon Ramsey, which I suspect is what made him popular. (And he has a decent balance of “No, don’t do that, it hurts me,” with “I wouldn’t do that, but it’ll probably taste good,” in his reaction videos.)
He makes a lot of pasta and tends to emphasize pasta-cooking tips Americans ignore: Salting the water (but not adding oil); making sure to cook pasta in a big pot and lots of water; saving pasta water for combining the pasta and sauce; and combining the pasta and sauce immediately after cooking.
I went ahead and tried making his basic tomato sauce and his fettuccine alfredo, both of which see some major departures from my standard: The tomato sauce involves pureeing carrots, celery and onions (sofrito), sautéing them in olive oil, adding pureed (high-quality) tomatoes, cooking until thick, and then adding basil when the heat is off. No garlic! It was a very nice sauce, very simple with a good body to it. I’ll probably build on it (including adding garlic, and possibly putting pancetta and anchovies in that sofrito) in the future, but I need to remember things like tearing in the basil at the end.
The alfredo was a traditional Italian version, which doesn’t involve cream or any thickeners. Half a pound of fresh pasta, a stick of butter, two cups of shredded two-year-aged pecorino. Toss the pasta in the butter, add the cheese, add enough pasta water to make it creamy, add pepper to taste at the table, and that’s it. It was really tasty, though a different food in a lot of ways from the American version: It’s definitely a side dish, not a main course (I served it with grilled fish and salad); and I wouldn’t try to add chicken or peas or any of my standard alfredo mix-ins to it. I’ll likely make this again, but mix it up with the American version.
(In both cases, the key is really just “Use good ingredients, keep it simple.”)
Overall: I’ll likely try a bunch of his other recipes if the videos catch my eye, but this guy is entertaining and the two recipes I tried definitely work.