3 Cozy Pasta Dishes You Need to Try This Winter

These Hudson Valley noodles hit the spot on the chilliest of days.

 

Ramen

Gomen Ramen

Kingston, Opening Spring 2019

Youko Yamamoto, of the late Gomen Kudasai in New Paltz, will be warming souls again this year with her pared-down, ramen-focused restaurant and bar Gomen Ramen in midtown Kingston. Yamamoto reveals that the source of her noodles is an unnamed friend/expert from her hometown in Fukuyama, Japan. She explains that true ramen expertise can take “100 years to cultivate,” so she prefers to buy from the source. The broths include her “mother sauce,” a six-month-fermented, umami health elixir she has taken each day for the last 10 years to keep her own health issues at bay.  Her hint: “It is the iodine.”

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Warm Sesame Noodles

Hudson Food Studio

Hudson

Chef David Chicane’s warm sesame noodles are one of the tastiest reasons this storefront window is steamed up all winter. He uses alkaline noodles — the chewy and grippy noodle used in most ramen — as a base, and tops them with seven-hour-braised pulled pork, snappy carrots, bean sprouts, scallions, and a kick of ginger all coated in a delightful oyster sauce. Chicane says he has become “obsessed with the noodle itself,” and explains that he wanted to “create a warming dish around it that wasn’t broth-based.” Like all of the food served at Hudson Food Studio, ingredients are sourced from local farms.

 

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Pappardelle bolognese from A Tavola Trattoria / Photo by Jennifer May

 

Pappardelle Bolognese

A Tavola Trattoria

New Paltz

Shortly after graduating from the Culinary Institute in 2012, Executive Chef EmmaRose Chudkowski began making all of the noodles used in A Tavola’s dishes. The pappardelle noodles are flowing, two-inch-wide planes designed to carry the robust, Italian bolognese meat sauce. Chudkowsi explains that handmade noodles have “a better mouth feel and more of an al dente bite,” which makes them particularly well-suited for dishes like this. Expect traditional Italian — not Italian-American — bolognese here, aka a mixture of several meats (in this case six) ground and simmered with a small amount of tomatoes, milk, and perhaps wine, resulting in a thick meat ragu that looks nothing like the red sauce at most Italian-American restaurants.


Related: A Nyack Eatery Ranked in Esquire’s Best New Restaurants List

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