Pimp That Snack

Absolutely Massive Alphabetti Spaghetti

by David Prime & Sam Ward 10 photos Rated 78% 498 votes when voting closed

My mate Sam and I have been scheming our pimped snack for quite some time now. We decided on pimping out alphabetti spaghetti simply because it’s so damned tastey and because it’s not been done yet! So, here is the customary shot of the ingredients:

Tomatoes, bottles of passata, tomato puree, six eggs and a bag of plain flour on a wooden table

I do happen to have four chickens in my back garden, sadly they hadnt layed enough on the day for us to use for the pasta so we had to buy extra in 🙁 For those that care, they are "Speckledey" hens, and there are only three now 😉

Four speckled hens pecking about the lawn beside their wooden coop, suppliers of the eggs

Since you cant really buy massive chunks of pasta we had to make our own, a messy, mucky and alltogether tiring task. We followed the instructions to the letter, honest guv, and came up with this:

Lifting sticky lumps of raw pasta dough out of a mixing bowl with both hands

Needless to say we are both pro chefs and this didnt phase us at all. So we pressed on and eventually produced this rather fetching lump of pasta, cut into wee pieces:

Dough cut into chunks on a heavily floured table, one piece being rolled by hand

At this point, I was willing to spend hours working out which font Heinz use for their letters. Sadly, I was dissuaded quickly and ordered to shaddap and get on with the tomato sauce. Sam, having completed a GCSE in Graphics, was the natural choice for the letter shaping. Here is a work-in-progress:

An oversized letter K cut from rolled pasta dough on a floured wooden chopping board

[rolf]Can you guess what it is yet?[/rolf]

Huge hand-cut pasta letters laid out to dry on a gingham cloth on the worktop

Now that our pasta was safely cooking away we could concentrate on the tomato sauce – this bit was easy; a shedload of tomatoes, pureé, and passata. The sauce was fairly unimaginative, and was lacking in the "cheese powder" that the ingredients list on the tin brags. Our sauce was also not quite as luminious orange as the original stuff. Never mind!

Pouring passata from the bottle into a big pan of simmering tomato sauce with a wooden spoon

So we have sauce and pasta letters. Houston, we are good to go! In light of the legal kefuffle currently taking place, we decided to play it safe 😉

Giant pasta letters in tomato sauce spelling PIMP THAT SNACK across a large oval platter

Here is an indication of scale, a plate of original Heinz letters and our platter of gigantuan characters. We rekon about 10:1 scale.

The letter-covered platter next to an ordinary bowl of tinned alphabetti spaghetti for comparison

Here is me tucking in to my tea, I must admit it was actually pretty bloody good. The pasta was a touch undercooked due to it being ridiculously thick.

A man at the kitchen table lowering a whole giant pasta letter into his mouth

It was so good, we had scavengers turn up to nab our dinner. Dig in! All in we spent about £5 on ingredients, the pasta was standard stuff: flour and eggs and a touch of olive oil. Very simple pimp, yet so effective!

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