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Credit: Photo: Ryan Liebe; Food Styling: Rachel Perlmutter
Pasta with a good meat sauce is one of those dishes that always hits. Whether it’s an Italian-style Bolognese, a slow-simmered ragù, or a rich, creamy pork and mushroom sauce, I’m all in. That’s why when I was reading through Ifrah F. Ahmed’s new cookbook, Soomaliya, I was instantly taken by the recipe for Baasto iyo Suugo Hilib Shiishiid (or, pasta with meat sauce) that includes an intriguing ingredient: a potato.
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Soomaliya is all about Somalian cuisine, and is full of recipes for new-to-me dishes that I can’t wait to try. But there are also a surprising amount of extremely familiar dishes in the book that are prepared using unexpected techniques and surprising ingredients. Take, for instance, the pasta with meat sauce. It’s delightfully simple and extremely flavorful, but the biggest selling point for me was the addition of a peeled and chopped potato. I would have thought that adding big hunks of potato to a pasta dish would make it too heavy, a textural redundancy, but instead it’s a wonderful enhancement. I may never make meat sauce without a potato ever again.
Credit: Andrea Rivera Wawrzyn
Why You Should Add a Potato to Your Meat Sauce
The starch-on-starch approach is not one I do very often. If you have one, you have enough, was my opinion before trying this pasta. Wow, was I ever wrong. The base of this particular sauce is puréed fresh tomatoes, to which you add water and tomato paste (along with herbs and spices). I mention that detail because it means the sauce is initially quite liquidy. The potato goes in towards the beginning of cooking, hanging out in the brothy sauce for almost its full cook time, absorbing all the flavors and becoming almost fall-apart tender.
The potato chunks thus become little sponges, soaking up all the concentrated goodness the sauce has to offer, and delivering it to you in one tender bite. In much the same way a chunk of potato in a bowl of soup is saturated with all the flavors that were present in the pot, this potato is so much more than just extra starch.
Tips for Adding a Potato to Meat Sauce
Don’t shy away from extra liquid. The instruction to add extra water to the tomato sauce initially gave me pause, but the extra liquid is the perfect environment for the potato to cook in. The sauce reduced and thickened up nicely, even over the relatively short 35-minute cook time, and I never would have known it was a little thinner than your typical red sauce at the start. If water is a bridge too far for your sauce, try a more flavorful option like broth or wine.
Try it with your favorite recipe. You don’t have to start with any particular recipe. Throw a peeled and chopped potato into your favorite meat sauce any time!
Further Reading
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The Secret to Better Baked Potatoes? Cook Them Like the British Do
