The Pasta Dish That Made me Rethink Zucchini | Kenji’s Cooking Show

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0:00 – Intro: Discovering zucchini’s real flavor
0:35 – History & first taste at Leon’s in New York
1:18 – Traditional method & keys to flavor
2:50 – Prepping zucchini, basil, and cheese
4:06 – Frying zucchini to deep golden brown
5:00 – Cooking pasta & why starchy water matters
8:57 – Building the sauce: zucchini, pasta water, butter, basil
12:10 – Adding cheese off-heat & final touches
14:27 – Tasting & reflections

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I don’t know. I feel like I didn’t know what zucchini tastes like until I had it like this. Hey everyone, it’s Kenji and I’m going to make some pasta alano. This is a um southern Italian pasta dish from uh close to from south of the Amalfi Coast, close to Sarrento. Um it’s super simple. So all all it is is zucchini. Um I’m also going to use a summer squash cuz it was at the farmers market. Zucchini, basil, uh some cheese. I’m using parmesan uh and some butter and olive oil and spaghetti. Um all right, so this dish is one that I actually had um for the first time uh a couple weeks ago uh at my friend Nick Anders restaurant uh in New York. Nick Ander is um an old friend of mine. Uh he used to be the chef at a place called um oh what was it called? Myino down uh near Grammar Park. Uh, and he now has a new restaurant called Leon’s uh, in New York that he opened up um, I think this past year. Um, it’s an Italian and Egyptian place that has excellent, excellent food, amazing chicken. I think chicken is their number one selling thing, but they have this amazing uh, Egyptian spiced chicken under a brick. Um, but one of the dishes we had while we were there um, was this pastaano, which I had never heard of before. Um, but it’s um pasta made with uh zucchini. And despite the fact that it sounds so simple and you don’t think of zucchini necessarily as a super flavorful ingredient, this was one of the most amazing pasta dishes I’ve ever had. Um, and so I talked to Nick about um how he makes it. Uh so traditionally it’s made by frying slices of zucchini in olive oil um or sometimes sunflower oil uh and then um combining that with some spaghetti uh pasta water and a little bit of butter to help emulsify and some cheese for flavor. But the trick is that you fry the zucchini uh until it’s really nice and dark dark brown. Um, and that sort of caramelized zucchini flavor, that caramelized zucchini flavor is really the key in what gives this dish um, it’s sort of, I don’t know, like a sort of smoky sweetness. Um, I’d never tasted zucchini so flavorful. Oh, and some basil also. I never tasted zucchini so flavorful. Um, the other trick that he says he does at the restaurant is that after frying the zucchini slices, he um actually rests them um in the fridge uncovered in the walk-in overnight uh so that they kind of dry out a little bit. Um I I tried making this dish at home the other day uh and I did it skipping that step and I found that it actually tasted pretty good uh just like Watch out to Michael. It tasted just fine uh without the drying step. So I’m not going to bother doing that. Um, but it is something that he does and if you want to do it, you could. Um, all right. So, I’ve got I’m going to make a half portion here. Um, well, I guess it’s enough for two people. Um, I’ve got some zucchini and summer squash. We’re going to use some extra virgin olive oil. I already had a little bit in that pan going. We want it to get nice and hot. So, not smoking hot, but but pretty close. Let’s get tiny bit hotter. And in the meantime, let me uh grate up some cheese. Actually, let me chop my basil. Gr some cheese. This basil is from a couple days ago, so it is a little bit um verging on uh a state where I wouldn’t want to use it. But in this particular dish, um it goes in with the pasta and we kind of toss it around and it um and it wilts a lot. So, it’s okay if it’s not uh basil in its perfect prime. Although, some some may disagree with me. Uh oh, I don’t know if you saw, but this the the zucchini that I have, I got this at the farmers market. It’s this kind of Roman style zucchini with the the ridges on it. Um, which tends to be a little denser um and more flavorful than um the the zucchini you’re used to seeing in this country. So, the you know the the wider zucchini or the green darker green zucchini, the smoother zucchini. All right, so nice hot olive oil. Going to get this frying. And you do kind of want the oil deep enough that you’re really kind of frying the slices on all sides. Deep enough and hot enough. That’s the real key. You know, with zucchini, um what can happen is if you cook it too slowly, um it’ll kind of turn to mush before it gets any color or texture on it. So, you got to kind of cook it fast. Um, so you know, zucchini I like to use um either big chunks in a really hot oven um or in a skillet or um maybe under the uh under the broiler or on the grill um or if I’m going to be frying it uh enough olive oil um or whatever oil you’re using that uh the zucchini that it doesn’t lose so much temperature that the zucchini kind of like just sits there and slowly heats up. You really want to see it sizzling nicely like this the whole time. I’ve also got a pan uh of water going here. I’m going to season it with just a bit of salt, not a ton. Um I’m going to be cooking my pasta in here. Normally, you know, you want to salt your pasta water cuz it’s quite salty. Not as salty as the sea. People say salty as the sea, but they don’t really mean it cuz the sea is actually much salt saltier than uh we think it is. Um but you want it to be quite salty normally. However, in this dish, because we are going to be emulsifying with quite a bit of pasta water, um, and that water is going to sort of reduce down and concentrate, uh, if you put too much salt in at the beginning, then, uh, the dish ends up too salty. We also are adding, um, parmesan, which, uh, can, um, you know, is also going to add some salt to it. So, you want to be careful about how much how much salt you’re using. This pan, by the way, is not uh, hexclad despite the appearance. Um, it is an it’s an unccoated uh titanium pan, non-stick titanium pan from our place. Um, which is a company that I’m I’m going to be working with a little bit um to produce a couple of new products that are coming on down the line, but um that’s not what this video is about. So, we won’t be talking about that quite yet. All right. So, we’re looking for this nice golden golden brown color, little bit of texture. You want these to get sort of as brown as they can get without sort of starting to burn or take on any sort of bitter bitter notes. Um, but we want nice deep golden brown. This is really like the most unassumingly delicious pasta dish I’ve had. It’s just like you think, yeah, zucchini pasta. How could how good could that be? But it is it is in fact incredible. Um, zucchini, like a lot of vegetables, uh, as if you’re deep frying them like this or shallow frying them like this, has a tendency to go from perfect to burnt, uh, and bitter tasting really quickly. So, you got to really keep an eye on it at this stage, not to let it get too dark. All right, that looks good to me. So, I have over here just a pan with a uh, a strainer set in it. I’m going to drain my zucchini off in there, and we’ll let that drain. And then I’m going to let this water come to a simmer uh and we’ll start cooking our pasta. So I’ll be back as soon as this is at a simmer. All right. So I’ll see you in couple minutes. All right. So I started actually frying this second batch of uh zucchini and squash. I just poured the oil back straight into here. You can reuse it quite a few times um and it’ll still be fine. Um olive oil, by the way, uh you might have heard that you can’t use it for frying or for cooking. Um that is nonsense. You can absolutely use it for uh deep frying um or shallow frying or even sautéing. Um it will tend to have a lower smoke point than a lot of oils, but um first of all, you don’t always need to heat oil till it’s smoking in order to fry with it. Like in this case, we’re not. Um and although some of the more delicate flavors of the olive oil might get lost um while you fry like this, there’s still plenty of flavor left in there. If you taste uh zucchini or say artichokes, you know, classic dish is um Roman artichokes, artichokes that are fried in olive oil and you can taste a huge difference if you fry them in olive oil versus uh in some kind of less flavorful oil when it’s done because this pasta is 12 minutes, I think. Let’s look at the let’s look up the time. 12 minutes. Um so we’re going to stop it after about 10 minutes. So when it’s still uh just shy of al dente because this is one of those dishes that we finish uh in a separate pan in the sauce. Um, so it will continue cooking even after we’ve boiled it. Um, so I’ll be back and uh this has been in here for about a minute. So I’ll be back in about 9 minutes. So I will see you in 9 minutes. All right. So the pasta is just about where we want it to be. Let me try a little piece. Yeah, perfect. So just shy of al dente. All right. So these zucchini slices, this is enough for a couple batches. So I’m only going to put half of them in here for now. I’ll save the other half for dinner later, maybe. All right, so we get our zucchini in the pan. [Music] We’re going to get our pasta straight in there. I’m using tongs to lift this pasta um because I want um the pasta water that’s clinging to it to come with it. And in fact, we’re going to add some extra pasta water as well. So, you can see how nice and starchy that pasta water became. Um I use only, you know, b just enough water to cover it by an inch or so. Um it cooks just fine in that amount of water. And with using using less water than, you know, like say the gallon that someone would recommend you use, um means that your pasta water becomes extra starchy, which makes the dish makes the dish a little bit sort of creamier and easier to emulsify. All right, let me pour in a little bit of that olive oil. maybe a tablespoon or two of it. And then we’re going to splash in some some pasta water. Okay. Then we’ll get this on the heat. And now here’s the key is that you want to cook this long enough that the pasta finishes cooking, but also that the zucchini uh some of those sort of caramelized edges um all that delicious stuff starts to come off the zucchini and flavor uh the sauce, flavor the emulsion. And add pasta water as necessary. You want it to be like at a simmer, not you don’t want it to be making like a sort of frying sound. You want it to make be making kind of a a simmering sputtering sound. You see all that nice water down there? It’s starting to turn brown from the from the zucchini. That’s what’s really going to flavor our pasta. All right, I’m going to get that butter in there now as well as the basil. I get some black pepper in there. If you’ve ever made something like kacho pepe or pasta algricha, um one of those sort of simple Roman pasta dishes, you know how uh this simple pan sauce, you know, the pasta water and fat emulsion works. Um it’s the same idea here. We’re doing a high we’re doing high heat for now. Uh because the high heat will boil that water really rapidly. Um, and that mechanical action of the bubbles going through the water actually really aids uh in the emulsion. All right, we’re starting to get a creamy sauce. You want it to be slightly looser than you want it on the plate in the pan because it will sort of tighten up just a little bit. So, we’re looking for a texture on that sauce that’s like sort of just shy of, you know, a texture that’s just shy of heavy cream. something that really clings to the pasta nicely. All right. Finally, I’m going to shut the heat off and I’m going to get my cheese in there. So, traditionally, this dish is made with a cheese called provolone demonaco, which is a uh a dish a cheese from southern Italy, a cow’s milk cheese from southern Italy um that you can’t really find outside uh of the region. Um and so we’re just using Parmesan instead. You could use something like an aged proolone, like a really nice sharp aged proolone um or a mix of proolone and uh parmesan. There we go. Look at how nice and creamy that’s become. Huh. Let’s take a bite and make sure that our uh seasoning is good. Look at that texture. That’s the texture we’re looking for. [Music] M. Right. Tiny hint of salt. And just couple little more splashes of pasta water just to loosen it up at the last second. And we’ll get it onto our plate. Yum. Those little basil bits out. Teeny bit more of the fancy olive oil. Another quick hit of cheese. How does that look to you? All right. Okay. Shall we try this? Look at that beautiful creamy sauce. And that’s all just from the emulsification of the pasta water, the cheese, olive oil, little butter, and then that really nicely caramelized deep zucchini flavor. Hint of basil. You’ve never I don’t know. I feel like I didn’t know what zucchini tastes like until I had it like this. Um, so thanks to uh to Nick Ander. and Leon for introducing me to this dish. It’s um certainly going to become one of my favorite summertime pasta dishes. And it’s so fast and easy. Um and it’s nice because, you know, it’s really sort of deeply flavored. Um but it it still eats very light, you know, I guess as light as pasta can. Delicious. Okay, I’m going to give some to my daughter. Go see see how she’s doing on her drawing. Um, and I’ll see you next time. All right, guys, gals, non-binary pals. Pasta ala nano from southern Italy. See you later.