Penne alla Vodka — The 1970s Italian-American Pink-Sauce Pasta That Went Four-Billion-View Viral in 2020

Transcript

Anna Park: On a Friday night in any neighbourhood Italian restaurant in New York, London, Toronto, or Sydney, somebody will order penne alla vodka. The plate arrives glossy and blush-pink, somewhere between salmon and rose, the colour of Tuscan marble at dusk. Each ridged tube of penne rigate is coated in a sauce that should not work — concentrated tomato paste, premium vodka, heavy cream, rendered pancetta fat, microplaned aged Parmigiano-Reggiano — but somehow does, gloriously. It is, by current measure, the most-cooked Italian-American pasta dish on the internet, with over four billion TikTok views since two-thousand-twenty alone. It is also the most fiercely disputed. The Italians say America invented it. The Americans say Italy invented it. Both are right. Tonight we walk through how to make one properly. I am joined by Bolognese master chef Lorenzo Bianchi from ALMA in Colorno, and Italian-American food historian Dr. Sofia Marino from Columbia University.

Chef Lorenzo Bianchi: Mamma mia, perfetto, allora — let me give you the ingredients first, this serves four people, the classic Bolognese restaurant version. For the pasta: four-hundred grams of penne rigate, the ridged short tubes, eh, the ridges hold the sauce — bellissimo. For the soffritto: eighty grams of guanciale or thick-cut pancetta, cut into small lardons of half a centimetre, eighty grams of one finely diced small white onion — that is una cipolla bianca — and two cloves of fresh garlic minced, due spicchi d'aglio. For the sauce: two-hundred grams of high-quality double-concentrate tomato paste — concentrato doppio di pomodoro, the dark red kind from a tube, never the supermarket can, eh? One-hundred millilitres of premium vodka — please, use a clean grain or potato vodka like Belvedere or Ketel One, not flavoured. Two-hundred millilitres of fresh heavy cream — panna fresca, thirty-five percent fat. Eighty grams of finely microplaned Parmigiano-Reggiano aged twenty-four months minimum. Salt, freshly cracked pepper, a small pinch of dried peperoncino chilli flakes, and twenty fresh basilico leaves to finish. Mantecatura — the emulsification — is everything. Che meraviglia.

Dr. Sofia Marino: The origin story is genuinely contested and genuinely fascinating. The first published Italian recipe for pasta alla vodka appears in nineteen-seventy-four, written by the Italian actor and famous gourmand Ugo Tognazzi, in his cookbook L'Abbuffone, where he calls it pasta all'infuriata. In the same decade, in nineteen-seventy-three, the Bolognese chef Luigi Franconi reportedly served a pasta with cream, tomato concentrate, and grappa or vodka at the Bologna restaurant Dante. The other claim — much better documented — comes from New York City. In nineteen-seventy-eight at the SoHo Italian restaurant Orsini's, the Italian transplant chef Luigi Franzese began serving penne alla vodka as a regular menu item. By nineteen-eighty the dish had appeared at the Manhattan restaurant Pasta Presto and on the menu of a young Lidia Bastianich. The American version standardised around penne plus heavy cream. The Italian original used many shapes and was sometimes lighter. Both are real. The dish is genuinely, equally, an Italian and an American invention of the late nineteen-seventies.

Chef Lorenzo Bianchi: Now the technique, this is wery important. Step one — bring a large pot of water to boil, four full litres for four-hundred grams of pasta, and salt it heavily, forty grams of fine sea salt, ten grams per litre — l'acqua deve essere salata come il mare, the water must taste like the Mediterranean. Step two — put a large heavy-bottomed copper or stainless padella, a saute pan, on medium-low heat. Add the guanciale lardons cold, no oil, and let them render slowly for three to four minutes until they are deep golden-brown and crisp on the edges, but the fat does not burn. Eh — turn off the heat for thirty seconds if smoke appears. Step three — return to medium-low heat, add the diced onion to the rendered pork fat, sweat gently for four to five minutes until completely translucent and soft but not browned — never browned, mai marrone. Step four — add minced garlic and the small pinch of peperoncino chilli flakes. Cook thirty seconds only. Garlic burns at one-hundred-fifty degrees Celsius — three-hundred-two Fahrenheit — and ruins everything.

Chef Lorenzo Bianchi: Step five — and now is bellissimo, the secret to this sauce — add the entire two-hundred grams of double-concentrate tomato paste to the pan with the soffritto. Lower heat to medium-low. Now you must toast the concentrato for three to four full minutes, stirring constantly with a wooden spoon, until the brilliant red colour deepens to a brick-red rust colour and you can see the tomato fond beginning to caramelise on the bottom of the pan — this is the Maillard reaction at one-hundred-fifty Celsius which transforms raw tomato sugar into something deep and umami. Step six — pull the pan back off the heat, then add one-hundred millilitres of vodka all at once, scraping every bit of fond off the bottom with the wooden spoon. Return to medium heat. The vodka will burn off rapidly — let it reduce for ninety seconds to two minutes until almost all evaporated, only the alcohol-soluble flavour compounds extracted from the tomato remain. This is why we use vodka — alcohol pulls flavour molecules out of tomato that water cannot. Pure science, eh? Perfetto.

Dr. Sofia Marino: Now the cultural footnote — between roughly nineteen-eighty-five and two-thousand-fifteen, penne alla vodka was deeply uncool. The American Italian-restaurant scene moved toward Tuscan rusticity and Marcella Hazan's three-ingredient tomato-butter sauce; vodka pasta was viewed as a nineteen-eighties relic. Then in April two-thousand-twenty, in the early weeks of the global pandemic, the model Gigi Hadid posted on Instagram her version of penne alla vodka — a quick-fire weeknight version with a tablespoon of crushed garlic, a quarter-cup of vodka, and chilli flakes. The post went viral. Within forty-eight hours #pennealavodka was trending on TikTok. By the end of two-thousand-twenty the dish had been cooked on social media over one hundred million times. By two-thousand-twenty-three the cumulative TikTok view count for the dish crossed four billion. A nineteen-seventy-four Italian gag dish became the defining viral pasta of the pandemic generation. The internet, sometimes, is not so bad.

Chef Lorenzo Bianchi: Step seven — eh, drop the four-hundred grams of penne rigate into the boiling salted water exactly when the tomato paste begins to toast. Cook eight to nine minutes for true al dente — always check the package time and subtract sixty seconds, you finish the pasta in the sauce. Reserve at least three-hundred millilitres of the starchy pasta water before draining. Che meraviglia, this water is liquid gold. Step eight — back at the saute pan, after the vodka has reduced, lower heat to low and add two-hundred millilitres of heavy cream. Stir to combine. Add half a ladle, about sixty millilitres, of the reserved pasta water — this is the mantecatura emulsion starter. Simmer gently three minutes, never above ninety degrees Celsius — one-hundred-ninety-four Fahrenheit — or the cream will break. Now add the drained al dente penne directly to the pan, toss vigorously to coat every tube, adding more pasta water if too thick. Off the heat, add eighty grams of microplaned Parmigiano-Reggiano in three additions, tossing furiously between each. The cheese must emulsify off-heat or it will clump and break. Mamma mia. Plate immediately into warmed bowls. Tear fresh basilico leaves over each, a final crack of black pepper, and a tiny final shower of Parmigiano. Bellissimo. Mangia subito — eat immediately.

Dr. Sofia Marino: A note on substitutions and the canonical disagreements. Guanciale versus pancetta — Lorenzo's Bolognese tradition uses guanciale, the cured pork jowl, but high-quality thick-cut pancetta from the belly is widely accepted, both work. Vodka choice matters more than people realise — flavoured vodkas leave residue, supermarket bargain vodkas leave a harsh chemical edge after reducing, premium clean grain or potato vodka is correct. The tomato paste is the single most consequential ingredient: doppio concentrato tomato paste from a tube — Mutti, Cirio, or Bianco DiNapoli — is fundamentally different from American canned tomato paste, three times more concentrated, twice the umami density. Penne rigate is canonical, but the dish works beautifully on rigatoni, mezzi-rigatoni, and even paccheri for a richer-feeling plate. And the Italian purist version from nineteen-seventy-four used no cream at all — only butter and Parmigiano emulsified into the toasted concentrato — which is honestly the version many Italian chefs in Bologna still serve today and which Lorenzo himself prefers when not cooking for tourists.

Anna Park: Three takeaways. First, penne alla vodka is genuinely a dual Italian-American invention of the nineteen-seventies — Ugo Tognazzi published the first recipe in nineteen-seventy-four in Italy, Luigi Franzese standardised the modern penne-and-cream version at Orsini's in SoHo around nineteen-seventy-eight, and both lineages are real. Second, the canonical Bolognese restaurant recipe Lorenzo just walked us through is built on three decisive technical moves: rendering eighty grams of guanciale slowly to the deep golden-brown stage, toasting the entire two-hundred grams of double-concentrate tomato paste for three to four full minutes until brick-red, and finishing the dish with off-heat mantecatura emulsion of cream and Parmigiano-Reggiano so the cheese never breaks. Third, the dish was uncool for thirty years and then went four-billion-view viral in April twenty-twenty after a single Gigi Hadid Instagram post during the pandemic — and now it is the defining pasta of a generation. Use premium vodka, doppio-concentrato tomato paste, and salt the water like the sea. Thank you, Chef Lorenzo. Thank you, Dr. Marino. Until next time.