Penne with Sweet Pepper Cream Sauce
Ingredients
2 servings
For the pasta
- Penne pasta 200 g
- Water for boiling the pasta 2 l
- Salt for boiling the pasta 14 g (7 g per 1 l of water)
For the sauce
- Large red fleshy bell pepper 1
- Shallot 1-2
- Garlic 1-2 cloves
- Olive oil 2 tbsp
- Cream (20%) 100 ml
- Sweet smoked paprika 0.5 tsp
- Salt to taste
For serving
- Parmesan to taste
Step-by-step recipe
Preparation
Take a short tubular pasta. Penne works best, and it is one of the most common anyway. Large sweet red bell peppers have long been available all year round. Add a little shallot to the sauce, as it brings light sweetness and a caramel flavor. And most importantly, do not use many spices, only those that bring out and enhance the flavor of the pepper in the sauce.
Prepare the vegetables: wash the juicy, fleshy red bell pepper and pat it dry with a paper towel, remove the seeds and stem, and cut the flesh into large slices. Peel the shallot and cut it into fairly thick rings. Peel 1-2 garlic cloves and flatten them with the flat of a knife.
Put the pasta on to cook. The sweet pepper cream sauce comes together quickly, so you can boil the penne at the same time. Heat 2 l of water in a pot and salt it at 7 g of salt per 1 l (14 g), then cook the pasta. The package gives the cooking time for al dente.
Sauce
Flavor the oil with garlic: heat 2 tbsp of olive oil in a skillet over medium heat and fry the garlic in it. When the garlic starts to darken, throw it away.
Fry and stew the pepper with the shallot until soft. Add the vegetables to the hot flavored olive oil and fry until lightly browned. As soon as the shallot starts to brown and darken, reduce the heat to low and cover the skillet with a lid. Stew the vegetables for 10-12 minutes, until the bell pepper pieces become very soft.
Puree the vegetables. Set one slice of stewed pepper aside for serving, transfer the rest of the vegetables to a bowl or container and salt lightly. I also recommend adding 0.5 tsp of ground sweet smoked paprika, which noticeably improves the flavor of the sauce and gives it a smoky note. Puree the stewed vegetables with an immersion blender until smooth, trying to leave no pieces at all. If you can, rub the puree through a fine mesh strainer.
Thicken the sauce with the cream. Pour the bell pepper and shallot puree back into the skillet and add the cream. Bring the sauce to a boil over medium heat, stirring. It thickens fairly quickly, and the final consistency should be close to sour cream.
For sauces like this we usually use natural cream with 20% fat or more. Cream of poor quality often forms lumps and grains, or curdles. If you know a truly good cream, there is no need to change it. You can increase the amount of cream, but then cook the sauce longer.
Pasta with the sauce
Combine the pasta with the sauce. By the time the sauce is ready, the pasta will be done too. Drain the cooked penne in a colander, add it to the sweet pepper cream sauce and toss well. The hollow tubes fill nicely with sauce, even if it is a little thin, and hold it perfectly.
Serving
Divide the penne with the cream sauce among plates and sprinkle with freshly grated Parmesan. Do not garnish with herbs. It is better to dice the reserved slice of stewed pepper and sprinkle it over the pasta. Serve the pasta while it is hot.
You can use fresh basil in this dish, adding the leaves to the vegetables as they stew. I love hot pepper, but I do not use it here, because I want to keep the delicate creamy flavor. I have seen green or yellow pepper used instead of red, which changes the color of the final sauce. Instead of shallot you can use white onion, which fries well and caramelizes its sugars.
Calories and macros
630 kcal
Serving ≈ 280 g
- Protein16 g10% of kcal
- Fat25 g37% of kcal
- Carbs80 g52% of kcal
100 g222 kcalProtein 5.6 gFat 8.9 gCarbs 28.1 g
Calculated from the recipe ingredients, excluding salt and spices. Data: USDA and Matvaretabellen.