Ottolenghi's Pasta alla Norma

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If I had to pick a favourite pasta sauce, it would have to be Pasta alla Norma: a classic Sicilian tomato-based sauce with baked aubergines and fresh herbs - so simple and yet so close to perfection.

Fortunately, baking aubergines requires very little effort to give them a pleasantly soft texture and bring out more of their flavour. It’s well worth it! And don’t worry if the aubergines look a little too soft or dark: that’s often when they’re at their best.

The recipe here is based on one by Yotam Ottolenghi from his cookbook “Simple” (publisher’s website), which is simply a great cookbook and contains many other recipes with good taste and little effort.

With spaghetti as a side dish, relatively little sauce sticks to the pasta. Of course, you can use other types of pasta, such as penne or maccheroni, which absorb the sauce better - but then you lose the pleasure of little nests of sauce on an almost empty plate, ready to be spooned up. 🥰

If you are on a vegan diet, you can easily modify the recipe: Just replace the Pecorino Romano with a vegan alternative and you’re done.

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Baking the aubergines is fortunately only a minimal effort to bring them to a pleasantly soft consistency and elicit more flavor. It’s worth it! And don’t worry if the eggplants look a little too soft or too dark: That’s often exactly when they’re at their best.

The recipe here is based on the one by Yotam Ottolenghi from “Simple” (publisher’s website), which is simply a great cookbook and contains many other recipes with good taste and little effort.

With spaghetti as a side dish, relatively little sauce sticks to the pasta. Of course, you can also use other pasta such as penne or maccheroni, which absorb the sauce better - but then you lose the pleasure of little sauce nests on the almost empty plate, which you can spoon up straight away. 🥰

If you are following a vegan diet, you can easily modify the recipe: Just replace the Pecorino Romano with a vegan alternative and you’re done.

Recipe #

Pasta alla Norma

45 minutes

2 portions

Ingredients #

• 450 g eggplants
• 8 tablespoons of olive oil
• 3 cloves of garlic
• 1 tin of tomatoes (400 g)
• 1 pinch of chilli powder
• 5 g fresh oregano
• 1/2 teaspoon sugar
• 150 g spaghetti
• 40 g Grana Panadano or Pecorino Romano cheese
• 10 g fresh basil
• 1 pinch of salt
• 1 pinch of pepper

Directions #

1. Preheat the oven to 220°C fan. Wash the aubergines and peel them with a peeler to create a zebra pattern. Cut them crosswise into slices about 1 cm thick.
2. Toss the sliced aubergines with 5 tablespoons of oil, salt and pepper. Place the slices on a baking tray and bake in the oven for about half an hour.
3. Meanwhile, peel and chop the garlic. Heat 3 tablespoons of oil in a large frying pan and sauté the garlic over a medium heat for about 5 minutes. Pour in the tinned tomatoes and season with chilli powder, oregano, a little sugar, salt and pepper. Reduce the heat, cover the pan and allow to thicken for about 10 minutes.
4. While the aubergines are cooking and the sauce is thickening, cook the spaghetti in salted water according to the packet instructions.
5. Add the baked aubergines to the tomato sauce. Drain the spaghetti, reserving some of the cooking water. Mix the spaghetti with the sauce. Grate the cheese and mix about two thirds of it with the sauce.
6. Serve in deep plates, sprinkling with the remaining third of the cheese and basil.

Carbon Footprint #

In total, two portions of Pasta alla Norma have an estimated carbon footprint of 1705 g.

This ranks it number 31 out of 52 recipes published on the blog so far in terms of estimated carbon footprint.

The carbon footprint of the recipe is therefore slightly higher than the average of the other recipes here on the blog: At least 50% of the recipes cause less emissions, but it is not yet in the worst third of the recipes. 🤨

When it comes to the individual ingredients, the eggplants and Grana Padano are particularly noticeable: Almost 40% of the weight of the ingredients are aubergines, but they only account for about 5% of the climate footprint of the dish. (Baking the aubergines in the oven produces about twice as many emissions as growing them.) For the Grana Padano, it’s the other way round: we use only 40g of cheese, but this amount is responsible for about 250g of CO₂ (that’s 15% of the carbon footprint of the whole dish). Otherwise, olive oil and canned tomatoes, as processed ingredients, have a slightly disproportionate impact on the carbon footprint of Pasta alla Norma compared to the amount used in the recipe.

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