Booze In Your Food: The Penne alla Vodka Mysteries

We all know that when you think Food Junta you think hard-hitting investigative journalism, but tonight, on a very special episode of Booze In Your Food we bring you a tale of science, intrigue, vodka, cream, and tomatoes that MAY SHOCK YOU. Stay tuned!

The subject of tonight’s investigation is Penne alla Vodka. Alias: penne alla Russia. Alias: pasta with vodka sauce. Anything with three names deserves a long hard look at its sordid past, but even after several minutes of Googling, this recipe’s origins remain shrouded in mystery. Was it a marketing ploy by an Italian vodka distributor? The lucky mistake of some sloshed line-cook? An insidious Russian plot to infiltrate Hollywood’s trendiest restaurants and get revenge for Rocky IV? We may never know the truth.

What we do know is that penne alla vodka began appearing on American menus in the mid 1980’s and quickly became the coolest thing since the popped collar on Don Johnson’s blazer, eventually attaining obnoxious ubiquity (see again: popped collar on Don Johnson’s blazer), before leveling off as just another sauce in the Prego lineup. Now it’s here, and it’s good, and ultimately the question of how pasta with vodka came to be is much less interesting than the question of why? Because seriously, what’s the point of adding a clear, mostly flavorless alcohol to an otherwise perfectly fine pasta sauce? It was a question that had haunted me for years (a boring couple of years), and so help me I was going to get to the bottom of it. Even if it mildly inconvenienced me…

It all started simply enough, with a taste test to see if vodka’s story checked out. Did it actually make a better tasting sauce? I made the following recipe, which comes from Lidia Bastianich via Epicurious:

Penne alla Vodka for some reason…

One 35 oz. can plum tomatoes plus liquid – ideally  Italian San Marzano tomatoes

¼ cup olive oil

10 cloves garlic

Crushed red pepper

¼ cup vodka

½ cup heavy cream

2 Tbsp butter or olive oil

2 to 3 Tbsp chopped parsley

½ cup grated Parmesan

1 lb. penne

-          Boil water in a pot – you know, for pasta

-          Blend tomatoes and their juice – but whoa, easy there Ferran Adria, you don’t want to blend them too much and whip air into the tomatoes, turning them pink. Just a couple of pulses. I avoid this problem entirely by being too cheap to buy a blender. Dicing the tomatoes works just fine.

-          Heat oil in skillet, add garlic, brown lightly – about 3 minutes over medium heat, or until the garlic is imbiondito, or “blonded”, or lightly browned.

-          Add tomatoes and bring to boil

-          Add red pepper – boil a couple minutes

-          Add vodka – reduce heat and simmer until pasta is almost ready, then…

-          Remove garlic, stir in cream and butter/oil

-          Add to pasta – pour over hot pasta, add Parmesan, toss.

A few friends were over for dinner so I gave each person a bowl of penne alla vodka and a plate of penne al placebo (alias: penne alla Utah), which followed the same recipe but without the hard stuff. Both sauces looked the same and only one person ever guessed which was which. Kudos, Hem. Kudos. Three out of four testers were fooled into thinking that the booze-free penne al placebo was actually the vodka sauce because they found it more bitter than the genuinely alcoholic version. The facts kept staring me in the face: there was something about the vodka sauce that people seemed to prefer, and I still didn’t know what it was.

This New York Times article which ran last winter offered one possible answer: apparently alcohol is a versatile solvent which breaks down both water- and oil-based compounds. I’m sorry, let me pause here to push my glasses up my nose. Ahem. The reasoning goes that any alcohol works as a solvent, and vodka just happens to be a strong but relatively benign, colorless, flavorless choice, which dissolves and draws out some unspecified compound from the tomatoes, thereby improving the flavor. Perhaps it breaks down sugars, and perhaps that’s why my friends found the sauce without vodka to be more bitter. However I found very little to support the idea; apparently alcohol is a pretty weak solvent. Clearly the investigation needed to go deeper but I was already in it up to the press pass on my hat-band. I decided to call in the Feds.

Every couple of years the U.S. Department of Agriculture takes a break from stamping grades on beef to publish a crowd-pleasing page-turner called the Table of Nutrient Retention Factors. This document is an amazingly thorough spreadsheet in which the USDA attempts to enumerate every possible preparation of every food on the face of the earth (from “EGGS, POACHED” (p.7) to “SEAFOOD: FROG, TURTLE, BROILED, W/ DRIPPINGS” (p.16)), and then tell you how much of the original nutrients are retained after cooking. It is sobering data; you’ll think twice about breading and deep frying a turtle when you realize that OH MY GOD YOU’RE BREADING AN DEEP FRYING A TURTLE. But you’ll think three times about it when you learn that your turtle fritter will be losing 5% of its riboflavin on its way from pond to plate. Page 16, look it up.

I came across the department’s handiwork while working on a hunch: we all know alcohol burns off in cooking, right? Sure. Common knowledge. In every cookbook. But what if it doesn’t? What if I’m still tasting alcohol in the sauce? Well it turned out that the most shocking information in the USDA table was actually the least sobering: alcohol is damn near impossible to get rid of.

Remember that doofus in your high school French class? The one who was “sooooo drunkrightnow” after two pieces of rum cake? Theoretically possible! But probably still full of shit. And to the commenter who asked if she could get drunk by eating bread pudding with whiskey sauce? Yes! If the butter and sugar don’t kill you first. You can even be making Bananas Foster, light the rum on fire, watch it burn off before your very eyes, and still be left with 75% of the original alcohol. I guess the retention rates could be a legitimate concern for some people (pregnant flambe’ fans will be pissed), but this was a break in the case and I couldn’t have been happier. If the alcohol hadn’t burned off then it must have been contributing to the flavor. In fact in this recipe the vodka only simmers in the sauce for a few minutes, ten at most, so we can assume that at least half the alcohol gets left behind. That’s roughly a shot, plenty to lend a sharp, biting taste to the sauce.

Ultimately what makes penne alla vodka such a delicious and successful recipe is the collision of different, and in the case of the alcohol, unusual, flavors. IN THIS CORNER, in the white trunks, you have the rich, sweet combination of heavy cream and butter. AND IN THE OPPOSITE CORNER, in the red trunks, are the tomatoes, red pepper and vodka in all their acidic, spicy, astringent glories. The dairy smoothness remorselessly checks the heat of the booze/pepper/San Marzano axis, while the bite and spice of tomato sauce mixture slices through the cloying cream in a culinary clash of the titans that has Howard Cosell clawing at his coffin walls in excitement, and which ends up tasting quite good. Balance is usually the last thing that you would expect liquor to help you with, but in the case of penne alla vodka that is exactly what it’s providing. Hell, this recipe is such a model of perfect equilibrium that it takes almost exactly as long to make the sauce as it does to boil the pasta. The vodka sauce mystery may not be completely solved but hey, nobody knows who killed the chauffeur in The Big Sleep, and that’s still a great movie. With pasta this good I think I can live with a few loose ends.