15 Minute Garlic Cherry Tomato Pasta

Linguine with bursting cherry tomatoes, basil, garlic, and olive oil. The first thing you're going to do is take those washed and cleaned cherry tomatoes and cut them in half. It's as simple as just one cut. Now you can cut them in the bigger ones you can cut into quarters, but we want to leave half of them cut and the other half not cut. Next for the garlic, I'm going to take about three to four cloves. It's going to depend on how large your cloves are and just give it a little tap or with the back of your knife hit it and you'll be able to remove the skin like that. Give that garlic a slice. You could also chop or mince it and I'm just doing kind of a thin slice like that. Turn on your heat to about medium low. I want to keep it pretty low because we don't want to burn the garlic. All right that's regular olive oil and that's extra virgin. Let's save that really good extra virgin for later. For now let's use regular olive oil. I'm going to coat the bottom of the pan with about two to four tablespoons of olive oil and that's my pasta. I'm going to get that that's linguine. We're going to get that in the pot and there's our basil. So while that garlic is cooking on very low heat, let's remove all our basil leaves and this is just a good prepping to do while your garlic's cooking and you'll have it ready for a few minutes from now. So that garlic is going to get lightly golden in the olive oil. We want to cook it. We don't want to burn it and we're going to probably after about two to three minutes when it gets golden get all of that hot red pepper in. Put in as much as you like. I'm using a quarter teaspoon for a half a pound of pasta and that pepper is going to cook in the oil for a few seconds and after that pepper cooks enough let's get those beautiful cherry tomatoes right in the olive oil. Now you can turn up the heat to about medium here. I want to apply a decent amount of heat to these tomatoes and some of them are going to stay whole. The skin is going to kind of crackle on them. While that's going on I'm going to turn on... I have another burner here but I already had my linguine cooking on the side. I'm just going to keep mixing that around. You can check it as it's cooking. Use the box as a general reference but don't trust it. I'm just going to stir those tomatoes around let the olive oil and the garlic really coat them. Delicious flavors here. Very simple flavors. Turn the heat up a little bit. I want them to kind of pop so kind of time it with your pasta. About three more minutes on the pasta so that'll be good timing. I have all the basil here. This is going to finish at the end. When you put your pasta in the water always make sure you stir for the first minute. Don't put oil in there because oil prevents it from the sauce, whatever sauce you make, from clinging to it. So just stir it for 30 seconds to a minute and that should normally prevent it from sticking. I'm going to take a little bit of pasta water in this ladle. Turn my heat to about medium to medium-high right now. Pasta will be ready in about one minute. So one more time check that pasta. Make sure that we want it al dente. All right so I'm going to salt the tomatoes. I'm going to need some salt here. Mix it all around. Salt's going to release more of the liquid from the tomatoes when it hits it. And then once that pasta is al dente, meaning it needs about a minute more of cooking, maybe to a minute and a half more cooking, that's when I'm going to get it into the tomatoes. It's going to give me enough time to finish the pasta in here without this pasta becoming mushy at all. I'm going to be able to thoroughly coat the linguine with the really great flavors of the tomato and garlic. I'm going to give it a little flip. It's going to increase the emulsification of it. It's going to thicken that pasta water a little bit. And if you need a little bit more pasta water, make sure to add it too. Just a couple ounces if you need it. I'm going to taste it. It needs a tiny bit more salt. This is cooking guys. Just all you have to do is just keep tasting your food before you serve it and you'll get it exactly perfect. You got to trust your taste. Your tastes are going to be good. You know what you're doing because you're cooking. And then see some of the tomatoes, they burst. The skin popped right off. That creates more of a liquid in there with the linguine. See how they're kind of like shriveled up? So it gives a really nice presentation and they taste really good like this. So I'm going take those basil leaves that I already removed the stems and give it a little rinse. I want them to be very clean and I'm going to add them straight into the pasta. I do this right at the end because knowing if you wet the basil even 20 minutes earlier, it kind of like tends to shrivel up. So I put on about a quarter cup on there and that's a lot of basil. I'm just going to flip it a few more times. If right now, if you're drying out a little bit, you just add a little bit more pasta water. So to make a really nice presentation, you take a big ladle or I'm using this big wooden spoon and I'm taking a long fork, you know like a carving fork, and I'm just going to twist it. And I'm going to make nests, individual nests. And I just think it looks really, really nice like this. And then you take the remaining tomatoes and the basil and you pop it on top. And now it's the time to use that high quality extra virgin olive oil. I'm sure you have a brand that you really like. Drizzle a couple tablespoons all over that linguine and cherry tomatoes. This took actually me making the video 30 minutes max. So you can do it even quicker. And I just finished with that really good virgin olive oil. I always use it to finish. This is the perfect dish for it. The tomatoes just get wilted and you know, really nice, really simple. I'll see you next time.