Chicken-butter pasta and a hastily made tomato soup

Who had time to plan this week? Not this guy

While I was on holiday last week I did try and stay off my phone, but one thing leapt out to me while I was scrolling Instagram. Chef Jackson Boxer, of Orasay and Brunswick House, posted a picture of a dish that used chicken fat (also known as schmaltz) and butter to create a silky, umami-packed sauce for pasta to cling to. I thought about it for the rest of the trip.

So when we got back home, on a Friday afternoon, I told Rob I was going to throw something like it together for tea that night. I had some chicken fat sitting in the fridge – we’d done something with roasted chicken thighs the week before, and I collected the thick, roasty chicken juices in a jar, knowing they’d come in handy for something. You can do the same with a roast chicken, too – the fat is great in roast potatoes, or added in with aromatics like carrot and onion when you’re making a soup base.

The result was such a brilliant dish, and I’m really pleased – it’s some of the first of what I’d call recipe development on Scraps, ie a dish I just threw together myself but have jotted down so I can make it again. I want to do more of this in future because, frankly, most the sites I get recipes from are paywalled (Bon Appetit has just launched one, and the NYT Cooking site has been paywalled for a while now). Not only does that prohibit sharing the links to the things I’m cooking, it’s not helpful for people who aren’t in a position to pay for more subscriptions. Both recipes this week are developed by me – fittingly there’s fairly rough measurements and a sense of whacking it all together and seeing what happens. if you make anything in this week’s Scraps, please let me know!

1. Chicken-butter pasta

You have to understand that there is no recipe here – just a vague idea. Pasta dishes like cacio e pepe involve creating a rich, glossy sauce from butter and hard cheese – with hot, starchy pasta water used to bind it. I wanted to do that, but with the addition of chicken schmaltz to give an intense, rich, meaty backbone. You could doll this up with all sorts of veg and things you have at home, but we were back from a week away – we wanted something really basic, with some fresh parsley and maybe some toasted, crunchy breadcrumbs scattered on the top.

The sauce comes together in less time than the pasta takes to cook – I picked up this weird crinkly pasta from Sainsburys, which is called Mafalda Corta, which anecdotally does seem to take longer than other shapes. Maybe it’s all the ridges. Anyway the sauce; melt a good wodge of butter in a saucepan on a medium heat, and once it’s picked up a bit of colour, add in your chicken fat. I had two and a half tablespoons worth, and I ended up using all of it – this is less a sauce, though, and more a thick coating for the pasta.

A fittingly seductive, rich jam from Oliver Sim (formerly of the XX). It’s like, what if the Monster Mash was actually about a sordid gay affair?

As the fat renders, gently stir the butter and the sauce will come together – if it’s thick or congealed in any way, a scoop of pasta water from the pan will help. The starch that comes out the pasta in the cooking process is great at emulsifying sauces.

For the breadcrumbs, see last week’s newsletter on a well-stocked freezer. Most weeks, I’ll have the final chunk of baguette or sourdough cut into chunks and frozen in sandwich bags so that, in a pinch, I can make some breadcrumbs or croutons for soup. These went in a hot oven to ‘defrost’, before I chucked them in a blender to pulverise them, and added in a small pan with oil and butter and a bit of salt.

2. Roasted tomato soup with roasted garlic toast

Just going to get in front of this now: the portion looks paltry but this bowl is gigantic.

At the weekend, we made tacos – not an unusual situation in this house. Normally we do fish tacos, and we make a little breadcrumbing assembly line, and Rob will stick on some Cleo Sol or Snoh Allegra and I’ll pass the fish and he’ll flour it, and I’ll then walk around and dip it in egg, and it’s all very charming and satisfying. When we’re feeling fancier, I’ll go to the butcher and get some bavette steak and we’ll sear it, slice it rare, and have it with a really spiky salsa. This time, though, we grabbed a pork shoulder from Aldi (for £4.75!) and followed a New York Times recipe for Tacos de Cartnitas that simmers the cubed pork in a flavourful stock for three and a half hours.

I’d never cooked pork like this before – typically we’re low-and-slow roasty people. But it was incredible, and I’d really recommend it. We maybe cooked it a little under the requisite time, which was fine, but it lacked the requisite shreddiness you get from doing it in the pan, then roasting in the oven. Anyway the point is, I didn’t want to waste the liquid we had cooked the pork in. It had long strips of orange peel, garlic, a cinnamon stick, and dried oregano, as well as a good pinch of chilli, not to mention the rich porky flavours from several hours of cooking. I strained (then drained) the liquid and stuck it in the fridge.

Cut to Wednesday, 12pm, and I’ve got no idea what to do for lunch – definitely not enough for noodle soup (crucially: no noodles) and I see a tin of tomatoes and wonder if I could whip up a tomato soup instead. Quick check of the fridge and I find two (two!) salad tomatoes, some spring onion, four carrots, some shallots. I decide to finely chop the carrots and onion and sweat it down in some oil while the tomatoes and shallots (as well as a whole head of garlic) roasts in the oven for 25 minutes. When the roasting tin comes out the oven, I’ll give everything a quick chop up, and chuck it in with the sweated-down vegetables, the pork stock, and the tinned tomatoes.

Bonus pic: the pork tacos from last weekend. I got the blue-corn tortillas from Sous Chef, and the salsa was the simplest one we’ve ever made; tomatoes, chillis, and onion. It was amazing.

As it cooks, the flavours from the pork stock – cinnamon, citrus, oregano – get stronger, and the tomato soup takes on an almost Moroccan quality. If I’d had them, I could have added in a tin of butter beans or something, to bulk it out, but I was pretty happy with it. You could make this with any chicken stock you have, or even beef (a stock cube would also be fine). I liked how complex the soup tasted given how slap-dash it was.

I toasted some thick crusty bread to serve with the soup and, on a whim, scooped out a few fat cloves of garlic from the soup and mashed them into the toast before sticking them under the grill.

3. April is veggie month on Scraps!

You might notice a theme on Scraps – we eat a lot of meat. I actually didn’t realise it until I started documenting when I cooked in more detail. I know a lot of readers are vegetarian and vegan, so April is going to be a month-long special featuring vegetarian recipes.

I’m going to be publishing some vegetarian adaptations of recipes from Scraps (including a miso-butter version of the pasta recipe in this week’s newsletter) and sharing some news bits, too. See you next week!