Drunken Spaghetti Feels No Pain
Submitted by Stuart Broz on Tue, 04/14/2009 - 7:36am
I've been a bit obsessed with the idea of Spaghetti All’Ubriaco, or drunken spaghetti since I read about a couple of weeks ago over on Serious Eats. What is drunken spaghetti? 
Drunken spaghetti is spaghetti cooked in red wine, absorbing the wine's flavor and color. I've added flavorings to pasta liquid to good effect before, and this seems like a logical extension. My prime concern was just how much wine this would use. Even if the resultant pasta is amazing, would it be worth it? I'd want to use decent wine - infusing pasta with the flavor of a wine I wouldn't want to drink wouldn't make any sense at all. Then I started to wonder whether I could get more use out of the wine? It would be boiled... reduced. More than that, though, it would be full of starch from the pasta cooking in it. In small amounts, it would probably be a great additive to many sauces and soups, providing both flavor and body. You can probably freeze it, too.
Original image by Takanori Ishikawa
Comments
Drunken pasta
Hey Stuart,
what a good idea, i will have a go at that and taste it for myself. I always add some stock cubes to my pasta cooking liquid unless it's vegetarian of course, but alcohol that's different. I'm not so sure about the starch in sauces like red wine jus for example, i find it tends to give them a cloudy appearance. But the use in a tomato fondue or something would be great.
Nice blog as well.