Pasta With Fresh Tomato Sauce and Ricotta

This is typically one of those simple dishes that depends a lot on the quality of its ingredients - but also needs to be executed very well. We really liked the combination of ingredients (even though neither of us likes Ricotta - we used cottage cheese instead). We also used a sniff of cayenne instead of the crushed red pepper, something I really enjoyed. There were two things, however, that went quite wrong, given how simple the recipe is.

The first is that you're supposed to season the (salted) pasta with salt and pepper even before you're adding the (salted!) sauce - and then you'll still add two types of (salty) cheese afterwards; hardly a surprise that it ended oversalted, even though I'm always very careful with salt.

The other is that the Ricotta, or which ever cheese you choose to use, shouldn't only be at room temperature, the pasta and sauce should be piping hot to balance the loss of temperature introduced by the cheese - and this really needs to be emphasized. Otherwise your dish will be lukewarm by the time you take the first forkful.

It's also worth noting that it's a good idea to add the Ricotta/cottage cheese in really small dots, and eat it without mixing the whole dish - kind of like eating pizza with dabs of crème fraîche! Also, I only cooked 75 g per person as I usually do, and this wasn't enough as the sauce doesn't really contain anything other than tomatoes - 1 pound of pasta (110 g pp) should be fine.

Serve with a salad.