Alison Roman's Elegantly Simple Mushroom Pasta

Hi, I'm Alison Roman.

And I am gonna be making one of my favorite pasta dishes

from my cookbook, Dining In.

My approach with pasta, generally, is that less is more.

And I don't think you need a hundred ingredients

to make a really delicious bowl of pasta,

which is why this one features mostly just mushrooms.

First thing we need to do is get our water on to boil.

It's really nice to use a faucet like this Delta faucet

because you don't have to reach for a handle

and if you've been cooking and there's stuff on your hands,

which there almost always is, on mine,

you don't have to get anything messy or dirty.

This is a lot of water, so I'm gonna need a lot of salt.

I'm gonna cook my pasta in my very well-salted water.

And I'm using rigatoni, but you can use any shape you want.

So now I'm gonna toast my buckwheat.

What's buckwheat, you may be asking yourself.

It is a grain.

And they go from being this almost yellow, pale green color

to this really beautiful red, toasty color.

And it smells amazing, it smells like popcorn.

So, using a bunch of different mushrooms

isn't just to be fancy.

It's because it really does offer a lot

in variance of texture and shape and color and flavor

and it's gonna make the whole dish

that much more beautiful and also delicious.

The nice part about using mushrooms

like these oyster mushrooms is that

I literally won't even use my knife.

I'm just gonna kind of tear them into pieces.

And if you were to use one type of mushroom,

this dish would still be really good.

And it could be a regular old button mushroom,

I've done it a bunch of times, it's still really delicious.

So a pile of mushrooms is great all on its own.

You would really only need to cook them

in some olive oil with some salt

to make them really spectacular.

But, because we wanna make things

just a little bit more delicious,

I'm gonna add a little big of garlic and shallots,

which make everything better, always.

(energetic music)

So I'm melting the butter first so I can brown it,

which will develop a lot of flavor.

But to prevent it from burning,

I'm gonna then add some olive oil,

to kind of make sure that it doesn't get too browned.

Some of the garlic.

And then the mushrooms.

And you don't have to worry about sauteing the garlic first,

necessarily, because they're all gonna

kinda cook and soften at the same time.

Season them.

Salt and pepper.

So, for this particular pasta dish,

I am not using any pasta water.

And that's pretty unusual, especially for me,

if I'm making pasta.

But the thing is, is I spent all that time

getting the water out of the mushrooms

to get them crispy and concentrated,

that I don't wanna add any water back to the dish.

Into the skillet goes the pasta

and then that shallot that I chopped.

You can plate this on a bowl or a plate.

I like to just kind of crumble Parmesan with my hands

so I get some larger chunks and some smaller bits.

And then those buckwheat groats that we used.

So, to create this kind of sauciness,

we're gonna use a raw egg yolk.

And not only, it looks really nice, obviously,

but I really do think it's the best

and easiest pasta sauce.

And so that's it, that's our pasta dish.

It was five or six ingredients.

And, you know, it's one of those things

where you don't need an extra flourish.

You don't need to add an herb just for color

because kind of working in that really simple color palette

is all you need.

So whether you're deciding to impress people

on a Saturday night or, like me,

you're just putting this into your regular Tuesday rotation,

it's always appropriate and it can always be this casual.