Pasta through your door? No, we’re not talking the local rapscallions being naughty. We’re talking about fresh tasty artisan pasta dishes delivered to your home and then triumphantly put on the table. We tried a taste of Pasta Evangelists special Valentines Polpo menu delivery to see if we could feel the love.
Valentine’s Day is coming, you may have noticed? But instead of risking romantic let-downs in restaurants over-stressed and often overbooked, why not sit down with something special in your own place? The money saved can go on a bottle of bubbly, or some rather fine wine, and of course, there’s no need for an Uber home.
London start-up, Pasta Evangelists is an artisanal pasta delivery company whose food arrives through your letterbox, literally. Cleverly they have solved the’sorry we missed you’ card that plagues our doormats by making their boxes letterbox friendly; if you’re not at home the courier can simply’post’ it. The rugged cardboard box can easily handle the drop.
Inside, nestled among freezer blocks, is your fresh pasta and cooked sauce. The pasta takes around four minutes to prepare, the sauces about the same. The food will keep fresh in your fridge for three days or you can freeze it on arrival and they have new dishes every week to keep things interesting.
To celebrate Valentine’s Day, the evangelists have got together with Polpo the Venetian restaurant in London to create some extra special dishes and soon our letterbox
rattled with a delivery of three of them.
The fresh pasta and sauces are all in proper heat-sealed bags and because they are laid on the freezer blocks, there’s unlikely to be a problem if they don’t get picked up off the mat for a few hours. The sauces are already cooked after all. We unboxed and found Taglierini with beef ragu (Venetian Secoe) and Radicchio, chestnut and Parmesan tagliatelle.
Each recipe comes with a card telling you a bit about the dishes’ origins, full ingredients with allergens highlighted, and the instructions. To be honest, it’s not rocket science. Boil pasta for four minutes and heat through sauces.
To make sure there is no confusion, each packet carries a coloured dot that corresponds to the same coloured dot on the relevant recipe card.
Owing to having two pastas and two sauces, it did require four pans. I think next time I would heat both sauces in their bags in boiling water, this would cut down on pannage and avoid sadly leaving sauce behind in the pan when it could be more effectively sitting on the pasta.
The beef was very good, what looked originally like not enough sauce proved to be plenty. The pasta is as much a star as its sauce of course and this was very good pasta; silky, al dente and not claggy and clingy.
The sauce, made with a fine cut of beef, had deep flavour and a hint of cinnamon, which added a middle-eastern note. This is a relic no doubt of Venice’s position as a trade route hub where many cultures would have collided.
The other Venetian dish was very different, light and sweet with the chestnuts and the slight bitterness from the radicchio. Here in the UK we have never really gone a bundle on the bitter leaves such as endive and radicchio but that’s our loss.
A deceptively simple dish, but very enjoyable. We shared each between us in a spirit of affection, normally I guard my plate like a sociopathic Rottweiler – I hate sharing plates.
The portions are for one person, officially, but we felt we could easily just had one as the portions are generous. Eating both left us a bit winded, but in a good way.
Did we feel loved-up? Well it certainly reminded us both why we love Italian food, even though its poor Instagrammability means it doesn’t get quite as much millennial’amore’ as it deserves.
Yes, the food was actually really great, probably as good as you’d get at Polpo, just less expensive. And you have to love that. Check out the Pasta Evangelists website for more pasta passion.Order with the code
FOODEPEDIA10
And get £10 off