Pasta in Tomato Pesto Meat Sauce By Kalyan Karmakar

BitebyByte is immensely thankful to reputed Food Blogger and Food Writer Kalyan Karmakar for his kind contribution. Kalyan, in his own words, is — “obsessed about food”. He has authored a book called The Travelling Belly — it touched the heart strings of food lovers across the globe. He is a a columnist for The Indian Express and NDTV Food, the curator for the Time Kitchen Tales from the Times of India, and writes for other publications as well. If you aren’t already, you may follow his blog at www.finelychopped.net, or twitter at @finelychopped (http://twitter.com/Finelychopped) and on Instagram at @thefinelychopped. A Bengali based out of Mumbai, Kalyan loves to travel, and share his experiences from all over the world.

Here comes the recipe in his own words —

 

Tomato pesto sauce:

I took 200 ml of tomato puree (wasn’t sure of the consistency of fresh tomatoes), a handful of basil leaves, a teaspoon each of sugar and crushed black pepper, about 8-10 cloves of peeled garlic, a tablespoon of salt. I put all of this into a small mixer and switched on the button.

Pasta in a Bolougnaise meat sauce theme. Here’s the recipe:

Heat 2 tablespoons of olive oil in a non stick pan.

Add 250 g of chicken mince (healthier than pork or beef apparently) and fry it. Water will came out of the meat. Let it dry on a high flame.

The meat will be be cooked by the time the water dries.

Add in the tomato pesto to the meat and stir.

Add preboiled pasta to the meat. Stir till the sauce seeps into the pasta. I had some very nice Australian cheddar at home. I broke 100 g of this into little pieces and added it at the end. Another minute or so and the pasta was ready.

I normally add regular cheese to the sauce at the beginning. However, if the cheese is special then I add it at the end so that you can get a bite of the cheese.

You could even substitute the mince for boneless chicken, chopped cold cuts or do a vegetarian version with mushrooms, baby corn, tofu, etc.

This is a slightly dry dish and it makes sense to drizzle a bit of extra virgin olive oil at the end. If you want your sauce to be more liquid-y, then try adding half a cup of water when you add the sauce mix. Or a bit of fresh cream perhaps.