Spaghetti al Pomodoro

About the ingredients:

• Spaghetti: Whole wheat pasta is the much healthier choice compared to "regular" pasta. For example, it has about four times as much fiber, keeps you full longer and doesn't make your blood sugar spike as quickly after eating (link, in German).
• Cooking time of the spaghetti: Traditionally, the spaghetti are drained a few minutes before the end of the cooking time so they can finish cooking in the sauce. I like them best, though, when they're first cooked according to the package instructions and then cook in the sauce for a few more minutes. What's your experience? Feel free to tell me in the comments ✒️.
• Fresh tomatoes, or from a jar or can? Both are a good choice in terms of taste. Keep in mind, though, that canned tomatoes are often cheaper, and fresh tomatoes are quite often shrink-wrapped in plastic. Visually, however, little cherry tomatoes are unbeatable. More on that below under #cheap_vegan.
• Salt: In this recipe the dish is only salted via the salt in the pasta water. For one thing, the pasta absorbs the salt from the cooking water. On top of that, a few ladles of the pasta water go into the sauce itself. That's why the ratio of water to salt matters. I recommend half a teaspoon of salt per liter (1 quart) of water.
• Water: The spaghetti cooking water takes up the starch released by the pasta. That's what makes the sauce in step 4 so nicely creamy. For this reason, the ratio of water to spaghetti matters. The less water you use, the more concentrated the starch in the cooking water. I find about 1 liter (1 quart) of water per 200 g (7 oz) of pasta ideal. Also: less water means less energy is needed to heat it. That not only lowers your electricity use (and saves money), it's also easier on the environment thanks to lower CO₂ emissions.
• Vegan parmesan: In my recipe for vegan spaghetti carbonara you'll find a particularly quick recipe for vegan parmesan. The plant-based alternative is made from just four ingredients and ready in 5 minutes.

#cheap_vegan:

With this dish, cheap and tasty go together perfectly (as of 2023):

• Plastic-free version: €2.40 per person
• If you allow a bit more plastic packaging: €2.18 per person.

To bring the price down a little, I used canned tomatoes in the calculation. Their price is stable throughout the year, they're much cheaper than fresh cherry tomatoes and they taste great. They just can't quite keep up visually. If you still don't want to do without fresh tomatoes, I recommend the summer months of June to August, when they cost only about half as much. You'll find statistics on the seasonal price trend here (in German): statista.com.

#plasticfree:

• You can very easily shop for this recipe plastic-free. If the cherry tomatoes are shrink-wrapped in plastic, you can use regular vine tomatoes instead, or whole or chopped canned tomatoes.
• Onions and garlic unfortunately often still come in plastic nets. Luckily, you can find these staples sold loose more and more often in well-stocked supermarkets or at the classic farmers' market.
• Spaghetti are available in cardboard packaging, e.g. from Barilla. If you have some time and feel like it, you can even make your own spaghetti. The taste is hard to beat!
• Basil: With a bit of luck, the greengrocer sells fresh basil in bunches. Since the herb is a little delicate in bunches, it's often kept in the cold room and only brought out on request. So it's worth asking the seller whether they currently have fresh basil in stock. Otherwise, basil is sometimes available frozen.