This is a post that starts with a book, which is only right given my real news of the week.
The Geometry of Pasta is a book I had coveted for quite a while, and even put on my Christmas wish list one year. But nobody took the bait until the following year, when C. gave it to me, because she loves me and because she knows what kind of dinners would result. The idea behind the book, and behind a lot of Italian cooking, is that certain shapes of pasta belong with certain specific sauces for very important, math-based reasons. Orecchiette, for example, go wonderfully with crumbled sausage and chopped broccoli rabe, because the bits of meat and vegetables nestle into the ear-shaped pasta. Some sauces cling better to a pasta with ridges. Some pastas work best with rich, oily sauces. In short, the reason Italian menus so often look the same is that there is a Right Way of Doing Things. The Italians might not be as rigid in their culinary techniques as the French, but there is still quite a lot of thought behind all those traditional recipes. And this book explains the process.
I appreciate when there is a Right Way of Doing Things in the kitchen, but as often as not, knowing the Right Way just provides me with the ammunition to do things My Way and still get a good dinner out of it. Which is what happened here. I had a box of bucatini, and a pile of tomatoes, and some sausage. Bucatini, I learned, is traditionally served with an amatriciana sauce, but all the other ones on the approved list were equally rich, even if they weren’t meat-based, and often had a base of tomatoes. So I flipped around, found a recipe intended for gnocchi, and voila*, bucatini with sausage ragu.
Begin with some sausage links. Brown them in oil, in a hot pan, and then remove to a plate. It’s ok if they haven’t cooked through, because they will later. Slice them into 3/4″ rounds and then move on to the veggies.
Chop the garlic, and brown it just slightly in olive oil.
Then add some red pepper flakes, a lot of chopped tomatoes, and the sausage chunks.
Simmer for a long time, like nearly an hour. Don’t wait as long as you think you should to get the pasta water boiling, because bucatini, man, even with the hole down the middle, they take a rather long time to cook through. Which should be done in nicely salted water. Save a cup of the pasta water, just in case the sauce needs thinning, then drain the pasta.
Take the sauce off the heat and add in some fresh herbs, The cookbook recommends rosemary, but I had an abundance of basil, so that’s what I used, and it was lovely.
Taste for salt (which shouldn’t be a problem, given all that sausage) and mix in the pasta.
I highly recommend this slightly unorthodox pasta/sauce combination. I also recommend having it for leftovers the next day, with or without some added fresh chopped tomatoes. If you opt for the tomatoes, try drizzling on a little red wine vinegar and olive oil.
*What is Italian for “voila”?
The CSA Files 