Penne all'Arrabbiata

Arrabbiata means angry, and the name refers to the chilli. It is a Roman dish, it has four real ingredients, and like most Roman pasta it is unforgiving of shortcuts because there is nothing to hide behind.

Buy whole tomatoes and crush them yourself

Tinned chopped tomatoes are almost always treated with calcium chloride, a firming agent that keeps the cubes intact through processing. That is useful for the manufacturer and unhelpful for you: the pieces refuse to break down, and the sauce stays watery with hard little cubes suspended in it.

Whole plum tomatoes have no such treatment. Crushed by hand they collapse into a sauce with irregular texture, some pieces silky and some still recognisable, which is exactly right here.

San Marzano tomatoes are the classic choice and genuinely better — lower in seeds, sweeter, less acidic — but any decent whole plum tomato beats a chopped one.

Cook it until the oil separates

The visual cue for a finished tomato sauce is oil pooling at the edges and on the surface. Before that point the sauce is still mostly water and tastes thin and sharp.

Twelve to fifteen minutes at a decent simmer gets you there. It should reduce noticeably and darken from bright red toward brick.

No onion, no herbs, no sugar

Arrabbiata is not a general-purpose tomato sauce. There is no onion, no basil, no oregano and no sugar. Adding them makes something perfectly nice that is not this dish.

Parsley at the end is traditional. Pecorino rather than Parmigiano is the Roman choice, and it is sharper and saltier, which suits the chilli.

Finish the pasta in the pan

Draining pasta and spooning sauce over the top leaves two separate things on a plate. Draining it early and letting it finish in the sauce with a splash of pasta water lets it absorb flavour in its last two minutes and lets the starch bind the sauce to it.

Penne rigate — the ridged kind — holds sauce far better than the smooth version. The ridges are not decorative.

How much chilli

Two teaspoons of flakes for four people gives a warmth that builds rather than a burn. Roman versions are often considerably hotter. Fresh red chilli works too and is milder and fruitier; dried flakes give the sharper, drier heat the dish is known for.

Nutrition

About 520 calories a serving. Cooked tomatoes are a better source of lycopene than raw ones — heat breaks down the cell walls and makes it more available, and the olive oil helps you absorb it, since it is fat-soluble.

The sauce keeps for four days in the fridge and freezes well, so it is worth doubling.