Late last year, I moved from California to the American South. People will benignly ask me “how I am liking it,” or on occasion say “that’s quite a move”, but my favorite response is “oh, I bet that’s been an interesting adjustment…!” because what they really mean—especially the ones still living in California—is why would anyone do this to themselves by choice when everyone where you are dreams of leaving there to come here?
This is not true. People here love living here. But this belief persists because, I think, California is still mythologized as the Promised Land of Infinite Glamour: where everyone has a sun-drenched golden hour kitchen, where restaurant openings get their own articles in other cities’ newspapers, where you are in the right healthy mindset to do Pilates every day and your hair is magically frizz-free and you are wearing at least one item from Reformation at all times, where every night you can watch the sun set screaming orange over 14 karat sand and big wormy freeway tangles and be reminded of your aliveness, where on weekends you can drive to Malibu to sit on the rocks and watch waves and eat fried prawns from a roadside shack, infinitely free, dangling off the edge of the socially-influential earth. It is all of those things.
It also is a lot of other things: whiners, potholes, $300 omakase before tip, Uber drivers with ketamine shovels slung around the necks of their rearview mirrors, cars backed up outside the Erewhon parking garage and into oncoming traffic, package theft, pretending you don’t see the “[anything] Girlies” with face injections they think no one notices slyly taking pictures of each other at Bar Caló so you don’t embarrass them, the same story twenty times about seeing Jason Momoa at the hot bar of a Whole Foods, watching a teen boy skateboard through the Hollywood Popeye’s drive-through with a machete strapped to his backpack, participating in hazy conversations about psilocybin’s impact on The Creative Process™ on the pool deck of an Atlantic Records party where everyone knows someone except you, averting your eyes from the stranger who is charging their phone at the front doorstep outlet of someone else’s million-dollar house you will never in as many years be able to afford.
One innocuous and well-meaning question I often get is how the food scene compares. California is infamous as a kind of divine farmer’s market utopia; many of these markets are popular enough to sell their own branded merch and, thanks to the extensive growing season for produce, you can reliably buy all kinds of things there that are technically in season, all year round, that you really can’t get anywhere else. The scene absolutely explodes starting in mid-July, tables full of zucchini blossoms and peppers so huge they have their own personalities and those fat water-balloon heirlooms you see people on Instagram slicing and eating on toast with nothing but mayo and sea salt. The other Big Deal Tomato is the sungold, my personal favorite and vastly superior to the off-season cherry or grape tomatoes you get in plastic cartons. I created this pomodoro riff last year to use some of those up, but never made a big deal about it because a) it’s barely a recipe anyway and b) it requires the use of a highly specific (and, I thought, potentially regional) tomato variety that I feared would make it feel inaccessible for most people: a frustrating, California-delusional waste of time to anyone but my own neighbors, who in true Los Angeles fashion I did not really ever talk to anyway.
Fortunately, I now know the sungold explosion is not a California thing. It is not even just a farmer’s market thing. It is a summer thing, and whether you are south or west or east or in Texas or in the middle of effing nowhere like the suburban town where I grew up, you will almost certainly find everything you need locally, in season, to make this very summery sungold pasta right now. The catch: sungold season is not a long season. In California, you might have a month longer to make it. For the rest of us, the time is now. So let’s get to work.
how it’s done
This is an extremely minimal sauce: a clove of garlic (or more—I’ve gone up to 4 cloves, it just depends what you’re in the mood for), butter for silkiness, olive oil for flavor, basil for freshness, and a fuck ton of sungold tomatoes, fresh from the market or garden or Whole Foods or wherever you find them. After gently sautéing your garlic in butter and oil, you add the tomatoes and let them break down, simmering for about 30 minutes with a few of your basil stems. Because sungolds run super sweet and get even sweeter as they cook, you will want to splash in a small amount of some kind of neutral acid booster—wine vinegar will work, either red or white; so will a little lemon juice—to rebalance the flavors. You can then hit it with a stick blender either partially or fully to force the olive oil and butter deeper into the tomatoes, which silkens it into a bright orange velvet sauce. The basil stems just get blended right in. While there’s no requirement to blend it, it’s worth the extra effort and dish to wash, something I almost never say—but if you choose not to, that’s fine. It’s still going to taste great.
Like most of my recipes, this one finishes by using tongs to move over your hot-but-kinda-crunchy pasta into the sauce and letting it simmer with pasta water until it reaches al dente; after, you scatter it with torn or ribboned basil and grate over whatever salty cheese most appeals to you. Here I used ricotta salata, a dried version of sheep’s milk ricotta that’s somewhere between a mozzarella and parm in aesthetic, with the texture and brine hit of a feta. Having just made it again, I can confirm it was equally at home on my dusty California patio as it is now on my muggy back porch, watching fireflies in the Southern trees. I am very confident it will be right at home in your kitchen, too.
I suppose there is one difference, though. In California, time is suspended in one flat season. Yeah, you can tell when it is in the year by the amount of daylight, but not what year it is, or how many years it’s been. Mostly this forces you to mark time by personal growth, not by climate cycles—an interesting window into why 7 years passed so fast for me there without any meaningful progression towards anything substantial. Time is obviously no more infinite there. It’s just easier to feel like it is.
Here, though, it’s hard to make such a seasonally-specific dish and not think about how fast the days are moving, how the things on the tables at the Saturday morning market might not be there next week and there’s nothing you can do about it, other than I guess trying to give them a worthwhile sendoff. Seasonal climates are uniquely able to generate an abstract sense of existential urgency. Soon it will be not only dark, but cold. You will want a fire on. You’ll make up some chili, and that’s nice. But where did it all go? If time is the most expensive resource in the world, how can it be this easy to blow through so much of it so quickly?
My fiancé will tell me every so often that he gets sad going to bed at night because it means we have one day less together on earth. He hates time. I get sad about it too, but what else can we do? Try with all our power to squeeze the most juice out of it, which is not meant to be a tomato pun. It’s tempting to live in the future, make plans, long for wet fall gloom, get excited for Christmas lights, try to skip ahead to The Next Thing you are looking forward to. But maybe just… don’t. There will be a time for all of it. There is a time for everything. And, at least right now, it’s a great time to soak in what’s golden until there’s nothing left to do but go inside.
You need
2 pints sungold tomatoes
1-4 cloves of garlic; you choose your fate
2 tbsp. olive oil
2 tbsp. butter
A small handful of basil; leaves and stems separated
Kosher salt, to taste
1 tsp. white wine vinegar; can sub red wine vinegar or lemon juice
8 oz pasta; I like a long shape
Some kind of nice grating cheese; ricotta salata is fun, or feel free to use parm reg
Make it
Get prepped. Remove any tomato stems from your sungolds and give them a good rinse. Thinly slice the garlic; if you’re blending, you can also just give it a rough chop. Tear basil leaves off the stems and either ribbon the basil (I lay a few leaves flat and roll lengthwise, parallel to the stem and then slice down the line) or just tear them up.
Heat 2 tbsp. olive oil and 2 tbsp. butter in a medium-sized saucepan, skillet, or Dutch oven (3 quarts or so) over medium-heat. Sauté the garlic about 30 seconds until fragrant.
Create the sauce. Toss all your tomatoes, the basil stems, and salt (I used maybe 1/2 tsp.) into the buttery oil. Gently stir to combine and lower the heat to low. Partially cover and simmer about 35-40 minutes, until all the cherry tomatoes have burst and have released a lot of liquid.
Cook pasta. After about 30 minutes, set some salty water to boil. Shoot for 2 minutes under al dente.
Optional: blend the sauce. While the pasta cooks, use a stick blender to puree the sauce (including the basil stems) to whatever consistency you like. You can also transfer the tomatoes into a blender, or move them into another vessel for blending if your pan is wide (you won’t be able to immerse the blades on a stick blender if this is the case). Put the sauce back into the saucepan on low heat.
Combine pasta with sauce. Use tongs to move the still-crunchy pasta straight over into the pan with the sauce. Add pasta water and simmer on low until fully al dente, then serve into bowls. Scatter with basil ribbons and shower with a bit of your favorite salty cheese; take your bowls outside if you can, along with more cheese.
PS. You can totally serve this with grilled chicken if you want. It is actually a delicious use of a chicken breast. Marinate it in Italian dressing first. Really go full midwest with it. It is your time to be alive!