Pasta al Limone Walked So This Baby Could FLY

sumac & lemon pasta recipe, plus glossy pasta tips

Okay, I admit it. Last week's recipe was a lot. I asked you to perform minor chicken butchery, wait two whole days, and buy prunes. This week, we’re gonna keep things chill with a recipe that requires 20 minutes and six ingredients (including salt!). I first made this sumac and lemon pasta because I thought pasta would be pretty all speckled with pink, but she turned out to be so much more than cute. 

Sumac brings fruity and funky depth to the classic Pasta al Limone. Something magical happens from layering different sources of acid—lemon juice brings citric acid to the party, while sumac steps in with malic acid, causing your tongue to curl in all kinds of ways. It’s what makes this seemingly simple dish taste so complex. I can’t really explain it. It’s tart, tannic, juicy, and just really freaking good.

I think everyone knows Pasta al Limone by now, if only thanks to Emily Mariko's viral version. It’s a classic Italian dish where pasta is finished with butter, lemon, and cheese. Folks got all riled up because she put the lemon halves in there. To be fair, she was trying to recreate the Limone they serve at Frank restaurant in New York, where they do add lemon halves to perfume the dish. Where she really went wrong was that her sauce wasn’t emulsified. 

In the food world, emulsification means that you’re getting fat and water, two things that don’t want to hook up, to connect in creamy glory. The most obvious emulsion is a vinaigrette. Just stir oil and vinegar together, and you’ll end up with a thin dressing that leaves puddles all over your greens. But give that same mixture a hearty shake in a jar, and it becomes thick, unctuous, and lusciously coats each leaf. It’s the magic behind mayonnaise, cake batter, pan sauces, and nearly every pasta dish from Cacio e Pepe to Carbonara. 

Here are five tips for epically emulsified pasta every time

1. Step away from the Microplane grater! 

(Okay, after you’ve zested your lemon.) The Microplane grater is fantastic for quickly turning garlic or ginger into a pulp and getting feathery-light shaves of citrus zest, but it’s bad news for cheese. Cheese grated on a Microplane is so fine that it melts too fast, making your pasta sauce clump, get greasy, and stick to the skillet. 

There are two better ways to break down your cheese: 

1. Use the small holes on a box grater. This is best if you don’t make pasta that often, so you can grate just what you need, keeping the flavor and aroma of the cheese at its peak.

2. Use a knife to break down the cheese into 1 to 2-inch chunks. Then, pulse the pieces in a food processor or high-speed blender until ground down to the size of coarse bread crumbs. This is a great way to break down a lot of cheese, which is useful if you're making pasta often. After a week, the grated cheese will begin to lose flavor, so don’t process more than what you'll use up in that time. 

2. You need more water than you think

It might seem counterintuitive that more water will make a sauce creamier, but emulsification needs two to tango. The fat you add to pasta needs water to disperse into. Not enough water and the emulsion will break, making the sauce greasy. Also, pasta is always soaking up water—as you stir, as you serve, and as you eat. Make your sauce looser than you want it to be when you sit down cause that pasta never stops drinking. 

3. Temperature matters 

Once you drain your pasta, you need to move quickly. Just out of the boiling water, the pasta and pasta water is at the perfect temperature to create an emulsion. Have all your sauce ingredients ready before it’s time to drain, so the pasta doesn’t have a chance to cool down. Don't let the sauce get too hot when you start stirring everything together on the stovetop. You want just enough heat to keep everything steamy, but if the sauce simmers, it will break.

4. Stir like you've never stirred before

Remember when you shake oil and vinegar, it gets creamy? Same deal here with pasta sauce. There is some starch in pasta water that helps bring things together, but the real work is done by vigorous stirring. In restaurants, cooks get real wild, aggressively flipping and tossing pasta in a skillet. You don’t need to have that much coordination, but don’t be shy and get everything grooving, even if some noodles go overboard. 

5. Trust the process

When you first combine the drained pasta with fat, cheese, and pasta water, it’s gonna look watery, clumpy, and greasy. Don’t give up! It will become gorgeously glossy if you keep vigorously stirring over gentle heat. I just imagine Dory singing in my head, “just keep stirring, just keep stirring, stirring.”

Sumac & Lemon Pasta

serves 1 to 3 | active time: 20 minutes | total time: 20 minutes

PRINTABLE RECIPE HERE: