Anime Recipe: Pasta Puttanesca and Purin from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure

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We're going Italian today with dinner and dessert from one of my favorite anime, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. The show follows the Joestar family throughout the generations and today's meal comes from Part 4: Diamond Is Unbreakable. 

In Diamond Is Unbreakable, characters have superpowers called "Stands" that are unique to each individual. An Italian Stand user moves to Josuke's hometown of Morioh in Japan and uses his power to serve up food that can cure people of all their ailments. He serves up a few dishes to Josuke's friend, including "Harlot Spaghetti" aka Pasta Puttanesca and purin, a Japanese pudding with caramel. We'll be making both today and I'm super excited to try these!

The Pasta Puttanesca recipe I'm deriving from the anime, but for the purin, I'm using this recipe from CookFiction. If you're looking to reduce the amount of sugar in your purin for dietary needs, you can use Stevia and a sugar-free caramel instead like I did and it'll turn out just fine.
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pasta Ingredients (serves four)

• 2 cups pasta sauce - you can make your own if you'd like, but a jar is fine too if you're trying to speed up this process. To make the sauce per the anime recipe, you'll need
  • 3 tbsp olive oil 
  • 2 tbsp garlic 
  • 2 cans crushed tomatoes
  • sugar (not listed in the anime recipe, but this will help with the acidity; start 1 tbsp at a time)
  • 1 tbsp parsley (or more to taste)
  • 2 tsp salt & pepper (ormore to taste)
• Anchovy filets (3 or 4 to taste) 
• 4 cups cooked spaghetti 
• Parmesan cheese to taste
• Seasonings to taste: red pepper flake, 

pasta Instructions

• Mix sauce ingredients together in a pot and let simmer on low heat to prevent burning. When it is at the desired taste, set all but 2 cups aside. 
• Add cooked pasta to the pot with sauce and stir.
• After searing your anchovies, thinly slice or dice them and mix in to the pasta and sauce. 
• Serve on a plate topped with parmesan cheese, olives, and red pepper flakes.

TO make Reduced sugar purin...

• Apply cooking spray to four ramekins and set aside.
• Whisk together 3 eggs and 3 tbsp stevia. 
• Once mixed well, whisk in 1 cup 2% milk.
• Whisk in 2 tsp vanilla or 2 tsp Jordan's Skinny Syrups Vanilla. 
• ​Pour 1 tbsp sugar-free caramel and spread evenly at the bottom of ramekins.
• Add an even amount of mixture to each ramekin.
• In a skillet, let 1 inch of water boil (you don't want too much water in here so it doesn't boil over and into the ramekins).
• Once boiling, add your ramekins, put the lid on, and reduced heat to low. Steam for 10 minutes, and then reduce heat and steam for another 10 minutes. When your pudding is jiggly, it's ready!
• Remove from skillet and let sit at room temp until cooled. Once cooled, let sit in fridge for at least 2-3 hours.
• When ready to serve, use a knife to gently release the edges.
• Place a small plate on top of your ramekin and then, with both pressed between your palms/hands, carefully flip it over. This way, the purin will be plated as pictured above.
• Optional: top with extra caramel, whipped cream, or fresh fruit.

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The Verdict 

The purin was amazing and surprisingly easy to make, so I'd give that a 10/10 for ease of replication. Since all you need is some sugar (or Stevia), caramel (I used Choc Zero sugar free), milk, vanilla, and eggs, it was really easy to get everything and recreate.

​I had ramekins already, so while my presentation was a bit shorter than the one in the anime, that was expected due to my ramekins' size/shape. The flavor was delicious: a nice creme caramel that reminded me in taste of a creme brulee, but in a Jell-O like pudding form, so that also gets a 10/10.

The Pasta Puttanesca - or Harlot Spaghetti as they call it in the show - was fairly simple to make, so the ease of replication does get a 10/10, but the overall score is an 8/10 since I'm rating it a 6/10 for taste. When fresh, it was a great pasta dish, but it didn't reheat super well the next day - the fishiness from the anchovies took over when reheating, despite being really mild when served fresh. I probably won't be making this again.

Have a food from an anime that you want me to try to recreate? Let me know in the comments below! Plus, follow me on TikTok to see the behind the scenes of how this was made.
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