Weeknight Provisions: The Twenty-Minute Pasta

There is an hour in Bombay — somewhere between the last meeting and the first yawn — when the question of dinner arrives with all the charm of an unpaid bill. It is for precisely this hour that our kitchen assembles the Weeknight Provisions kit each morning: everything for a tomato and burrata pappardelle, weighed, wrapped in waxed paper, and ready before the lift doors close behind you.

The kit is less a recipe than a small act of logistics. The heirloom tomatoes come down from Panchgani twice a week — Brandywines the colour of old claret, Green Zebras still smelling of the vine — and are graded at our Colaba counter by six. The pappardelle is rolled in-house from stone-milled Punjab wheat and pale orange desi eggs, cut wide enough to carry a sauce without apology. The basil travels overnight from Ooty in chilled crates and is, frankly, the better for the altitude.

The method asks very little of you. Set a deep pot of water to boil with a generous hand of Kutch sea salt — saltier than seems polite. While it grumbles, warm the olive oil in your widest pan and let three cloves of Kashmiri snow garlic, thinly sliced, turn the colour of weak tea. In go the tomatoes, halved and quartered according to their size, with the chilli flakes and nothing else. Eight minutes on a confident flame and they collapse into something between a sauce and a confession.

Fresh pasta is mercifully brief: the pappardelle wants three minutes, no more. Lift it dripping into the tomatoes — the clinging starch is doing half your work — and toss with a ladle of the cooking water until the sauce turns glossy and decides to stay put. Off the heat, tear in most of the basil and half the Parmigiano, and taste. It should be bright, faintly sweet, with the chilli arriving late and leaving early.

Plate it in wide bowls, set a whole burrata at the centre of each, and break it open at the table; the cream runs into the warm tomatoes and there is no improving on the moment. Finish with the remaining Parmigiano, a turn of Tellicherry pepper, the last basil leaves, and a final thread of the Puglia oil.

The kit serves two at ₹1,650, changes with the mandi and the season, and is on our shelves — and our ninety-minute delivery routes across South Bombay — from four o'clock each weekday. The twenty minutes, we regret, you must supply yourself.