This is my freestyle version of an “Tomato and anchovy pasta sauce” recipe found here.
This will be enough sauce for three big portions or four medium sized ones.
You need:
500ml roast tomato sauce
1 onion
25-50g of anchovies in oil
70-100g of pancetta (italian bacon)
50ml of Creme Fraiche
Some mushrooms
How its made:
Heat some olive oil in a big pan, chop the onion finely. Choose how many anchovies you want, I took about half a 50g tin. Chop the anchovies finely. Fry the onion gently until its soft and nice but not colored. Add the anchovies. Cook for something like 10 minutes and stir.
While the anchovies and onion is cooking – Take another pan and put in a small amount of olive oil. Fry the pancetta in this pan. They fry very fast so don’t leave them too long. The goal is to get a nice brown color. Use some kitchen tweezers to turn them. Put them on kitchen paper so they get dry and crispy.
Chop the mushrooms into quite fine pieces and fry them in the same pan as the pancetta just left. Leave the oil from the pancetta in there. When the mushrooms are nice and brown reduce the heat.
Stir in the roast tomato sauce and simmer for about 15 minutes.
Put in the mushrooms and the creme fraiche. Bring back to a simmer and add the pancetta (break it into smaller pieces). Taste and season with salt and freshly grounded black pepper (be careful not to salt too much, the anchovies and pancetta will have added some salt already).
Directly put it on top of freshly cooked pasta, trickle with extra virgin olive oil, put some black pepper on and add a few fresh basil leaves.