Lushy Noodles

Lushy noodles (Bucatini and Bacon)

If you have 20 minutes to spare and a functional attention span, give this Serious Eats Food Lab article a read. I'd love to know what it says. I have a feeling it's relevant to this post though, because cooking pasta may be the most challenging part of this recipe. It's easily the most critical component of the dish.

Here's the premise: make a tomato sauce, saute some bacon, combine the two, and then cook the pasta for its last two minutes in the tomato-bacon juice. You'll end up with succulent noodles, drunk with rich, fragrant, tomato flavor, stumbling through a maze of slightly crispy, but equally inebriated, chunks of pork.

The wholly non-tragic tragedy of using Oscar Meyer bacon.

Ideally, you'd use a pork product that isn't as in-your-face as Oscar Meyer Thick-Cut Bacon. I'll admit bacon hogs the spotlight pretty obnoxiously, but who are we kidding, we keep buying tickets to the show. If you can get your hands on good imported pancetta, the kind you'd ask the deliman to slice a single, 1/2 lb. ring off for you, that's what you're in the market for - well, actually what you really want is guanciale (ie. "face bacon") - an apparently prevalent cut of pig outside the northeast US.

Chunked guanciale from Buon Italia.

Guanciale is cured pork meat from the cheeks or jowls of the pig. People go nuts for this stuff for good reason, each little bite packs a haymaker punch of porkiness, it's like concentrating a 500 pound pig's worth of porkiness into a couple ounces of meat. I find the Italian Market at Chelsea Markets to be the best place to purchase it, as chunks of vacuum-sealed guanciale chill out unassumingly in easy-access baskets. If you're forced to pronounce it, go with "gwan-cha-lay."

Once it hits your lips! It's so good! It's so good!

So about this lushy noodle bit: your goal is to create a thin tomato juice that your pasta can be immersed in right before serving. The noodles will chug the tomato sauce without abandon, the pasta equivalent of shotgunning a beer, the fratboy equivalent of doing a fully-clothed swan dive off a balcony into your neighbor's new pond. In just a couple minutes, the pasta will glow deep orange, infused with flavor, studded with decadent little bubbles of pork fat and deeply-concentrated tomato essence. You don't need cheese with this pasta, you don't need a swig of olive oil, you don't even need a drink - because you'll finish this plate in no time, and by all earthly measures, you will have died. Enjoy!

Bucatini with Bacon
Serves 2

4 cloves garlic
Fresh basil
1 large sweet onion (like Vidalia)
4 tbsp. extra virgin olive oil
28 oz. can peeled tomatoes (Nina, San Marzano, Luigi Vitelli, etc.) 
Kosher salt
Cracked black pepper
1 tbsp. sugar
1/2 lb. thick cut bacon (about 12 oz pancetta/guanciale)
1/2 lb. bucatini (or thick spaghetti)

Peel the garlic cloves, squash them a little, chop the onion roughly, and tear up some basil leaves. These ingredients won't appear in the final dish, they're only flavoring the sauce (so they don't have to be cut perfectly). Heat up a medium sauce pot, add the extra virgin olive oil followed by the garlic, onions, and basil. Add about a tbsp of salt to the mixture and mix well. Cook the ingredients over medium-high heat until translucent and reduced, about ten minutes.

Meanwhile, pour the peeled tomatoes into a bowl and gently break them apart with your hands (watch for squirters!), discarding anything unusually tough or discolored. After the vegetables cook down, add the tomatoes to the sauce pot. Add salt and pepper to taste. Add the sugar. Cook the sauce, uncovered, for 30 minutes at a very slow simmer.

Slice your pork about half an inch wide. Heat up a saute pan and add the pork. Cook over medium heat until the edges crisp, then turn the heat down to its lowest setting.

After 30 minutes, place a strainer over a different sauce pot (you may want to do this step over a sink). Pour the tomato sauce into the strainer, and with the back of a spoon, press as much of the liquid out of the sauce as you can, through the strainer, and into the bottom pot. Put the clear tomato juice on the stove over high heat and bring to a vigorous boil.

Bring aggressively-salted water to a boil for your pasta. Add the pasta. After five minutes, begin checking the pasta for tenderness every 30 seconds. Once it's just tender, but still essentially inedible, it's go-time. Pour the tomato juice into the bacon saute pan, and turn the heat up to medium. Using tongs, transfer the noodles from the pot to the saute pan and stir well. Cook the noodles about 2 minutes, stirring.

Transfer the pasta to serving bowls with a circular flourish (it's all in the wrist), make sure to distribute the pork evenly, and garnish with a hearty sprig of pretty basil leaves.

They're all wasted.

Forager's Fregola Soup

Fregola Sarda reminds people of Israeli cous cous, but to me there's no comparison. Fregola are densely packed, round pastina made with semolina flour and toasted. You cook fregola in boiling water (or broth) for about fifteen minutes and you get a great semi-soft, semi-tough texture with each tiny ball. Because the rolled flour is toasted, there is a slight nutty flavor to fregola. The "Sarda" part refers to Sardinia, where fregola originated. You can find fregola in specialty markets, in NYC I've seen it in Di Palo's on Grand Street, Dean & Deluca on Broadway, and some specialty markets in Brooklyn. The big corporate chains (Whole Foods) will start carrying it soon because it's becoming trendy and because whoever makes it over in Italy has caught on to the rustic-looking-packaging-800%-markup strategy. I paid about $6 for 1.1 lbs (500 g) at Di Palo and $6.49 for the same package in Brooklyn...not bad. Both times it looked like this:
You can make it for a cold salad like you would with cous cous but again it's not cous cous. Anyway, I prefer fregola in soup. My first experience with fregola was with a recipe for Fregula con Cocciula (Fregola with Clams), a golden soup prepared with small clams, small chunks of pancetta, thin slices of garlic, a tablespoon of tomato paste, saffron threads, and a toasted crostini (recipe: saute the first four ingredients for five minutes and mix into fregola that has been cooking in boiling broth for ten minutes, cook for five more minutes, serve topped with the last two ingredients - done).

The other night I mixed fregola with a woodsy soup recipe to great success. Woods, nuts, sage. This is a forager's soup.

Forager's Fregola Soup
Serves 4
10 oz Fregola Sarda
10 cups fresh chicken broth
20-30 oz cannellini beans (2 small cans, 1 large one)
5 oz baby spinach, washed, drained
sage, about 8 leaves
garlic, four cloves thinly thinly sliced

olive oil
white truffle oil
salt
pepper

1. Heat the chicken broth until it boils, when it does, reduce to a simmer and throw in the fregola, you want it to cook at least 15 minutes, stir occasionally.

2. Add the sage and garlic into a small pan and very slowly heat until the leaves and slices crackle (maybe five minutes).

3. Rinse the beans and then, in a food processor, or, with a fork, mash them into a paste.

4. Add the bean paste to the garlic, add a little more olive oil, and then add to the soup.

5. Five minutes before serving, throw in the spinach and stir it into the simmering broth.

6. Top with a copious amount of salt and pepper to taste. Serve with two brave drops of white truffle oil per bowl. Bless America. Bless Sardinia.

A Torch Taken

After making my first taganu, I told my family about it, discreetly, one person at a time. Taganu is an Easter "pie" traditionally made in my Dad's home village of Aragona, Sicily. Aragona is a tiny commune outside of Agrigento, a province in southwestern Sicily. My dad and his sisters are all from this little village. Every Eastertime families bake up this eggy, cheesy contraption and, I'm told, bring it to a town square where some resident experts judge them and choose a winner. As my family started to open up about the whole tradition (my first taganu earning me additional details), the most outstanding part of it is how small and exclusive the group of people who know about this thing really is.

Now that I think about it, maybe it's the whole competition thing that made getting the recipe and technique for taganu so difficult. I guess you're trained not to divulge your special touch if there's a contest every year. Anyway, two of my aunts have carried on the tradition here in the States, and I've been eating taganu every Easter since I've been little. They never share much more than the already obvious ingredients, however, and there are definitely some technique pointers that need review.

I turned to the Internet, I googled "dianoo" (that's the phonetic), "dianu", "dyanu", "dyanoo", etc. Nothing. It begins with a T. I finally found a recipe when I typed in "Aragona" and "Tuma" - the name of the mild, semi-soft, sheep's milk cheese used in the dish. There's an article about it on about.com. It gives a brief history and the recipe, and I followed it loosely.

I actually came pretty close to the taganu of my childhood with my first attempt (my aunts never mentioned whether or not any of my family's taganus (tagani?) ever won the competition). Here's a recipe and some thoughts on the process. As you'll see from the list of ingredients, the whole congenital-heart-problem thing sort of makes sense now!

Makes 1 Taganu*
1 ciabatta roll, sliced about 3/4 inch thick for 14 slices
1 lb. Tuma cheese (or substitute 1 lb. Toma Piemonte), finely sliced *
3 cups Pecorino Romano, grated
12 large eggs
1 lb. mezzi rigatoni
13 golfball-sized Italian meatballs, halved (see notes)
1 1/2 cups fresh Chicken broth
1 heaping tsp. cinnamon
pinch Saffron threads
1/2 cup Parseley, finely chopped
Anti-stick lipid of choice (lard, butter, PAM, oil)

Preparation
1. Make the meatballs, set aside to cool, half them.
2. Saute the sausage meat for about five minutes
3. Cook the rigatoni in boiling, salted water two minutes short of package instructions, drain, set aside.
4. Heat the broth and as it comes to a gentle boil add the saffron threads, set heat to lowest setting.
5. Beat the eggs, then add the grated cheese, parseley, cinnamon, salt and pepper.

Assembly
1. Coat the inside of the oven pot with anti-stick agent.
2. Dip both sides of 4 slices of bread in the egg mixture and line them up on the bottom of the pot. Repeat with 6 more slices of bread and line up around inside walls of the pot.
3. Take a handful of rigatoni, dip in the egg mixture, and spread out on top of the bread. It should be 1 rigatoni high.
4. Scatter a few halved meatballs in this first layer.
5. Pour a little egg mixture over the first layer.
6. Cover the first layer with Toma cheese slices and a little sausage meat.
7. Repeat at least once more, reserving a little more egg mixture for the last 4 slices of bread.
8. Gently poke three holes in the cheese-egg-meat mixture and pour the chicken broth over the top.
9. Dip the last 4 pieces of bread in the egg mixture to cover the taganu.
10. Layer more Toma slices on top of the bread, maybe drizzle some olive oil, and say a rosary for your arteries.

Cooking
1. Bake the taganu, uncovered, for three hours in a 350 degree oven.

Notes
- I used a metal "loaf pan" that I bought for $0.79 from the supermarket. It's about 12 x 6 x 6 inches if I had to guess. I'm going to continue making it in this shape, it works well with the bread slices.
- Don't drown the bread slices in the egg mixture or you won't have enough for the inside. Just gently cover both sides with a brisk dip.
- You don't need much additional salt for this or you'll ruin it...there's three cups of grated cheese, a POUND of another cheese, sausage meat, chicken broth, and salted pasta. Basta.
- The photos above and below don't show the sausage meat, I'm going to add this next year.
- The photos also don't show the rigatoni-egg mixture dip, I'm going to do this next year.
- And finally, about the cheese. I told my family I found tuma. I thought it was just another pronunciation miscommunication, but it was not. The correct cheese, for the Platonic taganu, is definitely tuma, a sheep's milk cheese from Sicily. I used toma piemonte, a cow's milk cheese from Piedmont, all the way up near France and Switzerland. I defrauded the taganu deities, and I will try to get my hands on tuma next year as penance.

It's Grand Really

Stunning in its Understatement
I actually watched this video for the entire 4:06. I can't tell you, I just, I - what would POSSESS someone to post this! I mean it's useful. Please imagine for a second the person behind the camera. They stood over a bowl of clams, one of nature's most inanimate living objects, for FOUR MINUTES. Arresting.



Inspired by the best linguine white clam sauce I've ever tasted (prepared by the Golden Goddess, she of Legend fame), I give you my recipe for spaghetti and Manila clams. As a soup fiend, I love it when my sauces collect at the bottom of the bowl and wait for me to finish the pasta before I tuck in for a delicious, passionate, saucy finale. Slurping sauce off a fork for ten minutes is the reason I love food, and in turn, life.

This is not linguine white clam sauce, the Italian-American standby. That's a simple recipe too, but I would use bigger, littleneck clams for that. Whereas linguine white clam sauce is most delicious with each component cranked to 11 (garlic, clam juice, cheese, parseley, butter, olive oil), my spaghetti Manila clams relies on a more delicate harmony of flavors.

The idea with this dish is to let each component impart its freshness onto the just-undercooked spaghetti (which I prefer to linguine because it's lighter). I leave the clam shells right in the bowl because I want the essences of the clam juices to mix with the pasta as much as possible. I use tiny pieces of crispy diced bacon and hope that they find their way to some nook in the clam, because everytime you eat cured pork meat and shellfish in the same bite, a baby stops crying.

z911spaghettiManilaclams
Serves 4 as a first course
Serves 2 if you're a close friend of mine

1 lb. Manila clams (2 or 3 dozen), scrubbed under cold water
6 strips of bacon, trimmed of fat and diced
1/2 lb. good spaghetti (like DeCecco), split in half lengthwise
2 cloves garlic, 1 razor-thinly sliced, the other cut in half

small baguette, cut into half inch slices
extra virgin olive oil
parseley, chopped
red pepper flakes

1. Fill pot with water, salt aggressively, transfer to stove on high heat
2. Bring water to a boil, drop in the pasta, stir immediately.

3. Pour a glug or five of olive oil into a saute pan and heat slowly, drop in the garlic halves. Just as they turn golden, throw the bacon in the pan. Bring the heat up slowly so the bacon crisps up. Remove the garlic.

4. Lightly dunk both sides of the baguette pieces in the garlic/bacon oil, place in a broiler pan or some tin foil and broil/toast until crispy.

5. Meanwhile, in the saute pan, introduce the clams and the thinly-sliced garlic. Splash the pan with a some pasta water to coat the surface of the pan, or, if you're so inclined, use white wine here. Cover the pan so the steam circulates and cooks the clams' muscles into submission (causing them to open).

6. Once the pasta is about two minutes shy of recommended cooking time, transfer it to the saute pan using tongs. You definitely want some of the pasta water to hit the clam juice/bacon/garlic/olive oil mixture. Cover the saute pan again and cook for a minute more.

7. Take a crostini piece and place one in each serving bowl.
8. Add a pinch of red pepper flakes and a pinch of parseley to the pasta and clams, and mix well. Serve the pasta over the top of each crostini, making sure you portion out the sauce evenly.

Notes and Tasty Substitutions
You can definitely purchase premade crostini or croutons at any supermarket. They'll work fine. To that point, if you don't add enough of the pasta water to the oil mixture, you won't get enough liquid to soak the bread and make it taste delicious. At the same time, if you drown everything in salty water the subtlety of the clam juices and garlic/bacon oil will be lost. You're going for a greyish solution with globs of olive oil to coat the bottom of your saute pan. I would top the dish with a quick drizzle of olive oil.

In my mind, Manila clams are the poor man's cockles. I get my Manila clams on Grand Street for about $3.99/lb. That means you can easily pull this dish off for under $10.

Cockles are these vibrant, symmetrical, uniform little clams. If you can find and afford cockles, more power to ya.

Substitute pancetta for bacon? Definitely. In general pancetta has a more subdued flavor, and the theme of this dish is to remove knock-you-over-the-head-ingredients.

The Stories Are All True!

I love this sentiment:
Ma nooooo !!! L'uovo lo devi far cuocere almeno un pochetto... :(
Peccato perchè sarebbe stata veramente ottima...
Manca poco dai :)

And this one:


These pages are brilliant:

http://www.thepauperedchef.com/2007/03/pasta_carbonara.html
http://www.gennarino.org/carbonaraen.html


My take on carbonara:
There's not much to debate about carbonara having something to do with coal in Italy around the world wars in the 20th century. It was either a dish that became popular within coal-miner communities and/or a dish that reminded the Italians of coal miners. The word's root is definitely "coal," and "alla carbonara" means "in the style of the coal miners."

Some say that the black specks of pepper look like coal, thus the name. Others say coal miners got bacon from the Allied troops as they rolled up the Italian peninsula in WWII. Others conflate the two theories, and I'm down with that too.

I appreciate the spirit of the dish on many levels. First of all, it's one of those great peasant concoctions that carries with it all kinds of dignity and innocence and simplicity, and I eat that stuff right up. It's also quite challenging to get just right. For a pasta recipe with only four ingredients, this is a really tough one to pull off. Plus, my formative years in carbonara-making include late-night weekends in college and that's always a pleasant nostalgia.

I've made it for as many as ten people and I've made it a ton on my own. I've made it with bacon and pancetta and guanciale. I've made it with all different types of onions. I've made it with sweet sausage, with deep-fried zucchini, with peas, with scallions, with chives, with arugula, with asparagus, etc.

Anyone who serves you pasta, pork, and egg with cream is not serving you carbonara (this sentiment is repeated all over the Internet, as it should be). Carbonara is pink, yellow, and black.

Steve's Spaghetti Carbonara
Properly serves 4
Serves 3 if you're a close friend of mine

1 lb. bacon, diced a thumb's width at a time
2/3 lb. spaghetti
1 egg per serving

salt
black pepper
grated pecorino romano
extra-virgin olive oil

1. Fill pot with water, salt aggressively, transfer to stove on high heat.
2. Bring water to a boil, drop in the pasta, stir immediately.

3. Over medium heat, place bacon in a large pan with a little olive oil, stir occasionally.
4. Once the bacon looks a little crispy on the edges, turn the heat to its lowest.

5. Meanwhile, separate the eggs, keeping the yolks whole in one small mixing bowl, and letting the whites fall to the bottom of each serving bowl. Season the whites with coarse salt, black pepper, and pecorino.

6. Once the pasta has cooked about 2 minutes less than the package instructions, crank the heat in the bacon pan to high. Begin transferring the spaghetti to the bacon pan using tongs. Stir briskly, flip it around, stir some more. Distribute the spaghetti and bacon to the serving bowls, create a small nest in the center of the spaghetti in each bowl, and drop a yolk in it.

7. Quickly top with a shower of black pepper, a little grated cheese, and a splash of olive oil.
8. Instruct your guests to stir the yolk into their bowls, and enjoy!

Some words on my recipe (from original post):
I use bacon because it's the easiest to get and because it's delicious. It's much better with thick chunks of pancetta, and it's absolutely majestic, and truest to the original dish, with guanciale (pig's jowl/cheek meat).

The egg will cook, I promise. The water is boiling at 200+ degrees, and the pasta is well above 160 degrees (the federally recommended temperature for cooking "egg dishes"). You're taking a single yolk, breaking it up, and mixing it with boiling water and strands of piping hot noodles, it's going to cook! Also, this is why you use tongs to take the spaghetti out of the water - so you reserve some of that delicious boiling water.

You need a big saute pan/skillet for this operation. If the pan with the bacon is heaped up in more than one layer, it will just steam cooked and you'll lose the layer of flavor that comes from slightly browned meat. Consider cooking the bacon in batches if necessary.

I got the egg yolk nest idea from Mario Batali, and it really works the best. I always used to whip up some eggs and then pour it on top of everyone's dish at the end, but this often left egg yolk soup at the bottom of the dish and it's really easy to overcook the eggs this way. The egg yolk nest is really impressive and captures the spirit of the dish wonderfully.

This ratio of pasta-to-pork involves the absolute smallest acceptable quantity of pork. Any less pork (or any more pasta) will yield a dry-heaving mass of carbs and cheese - not ideal.

More words about the recipe (updated 4/8/09):
I had the great fortune of preparing this recipe in Italy, with ingredients from an Italian market. I bought great eggs, spaghetti, olive oil, fresh black peppercorns and beautiful, thick slices of pancetta. The results were a bit earth-shattering: the porkiness of this dish is much more pronounced when using real pancetta instead of bacon or the cured pancetta you get in American markets. I like it, and I believe this explains why grated cheese is in the original Carbonara recipes and seems a tad overkill when using bacon - because real pancetta/guanciale is not as naturally salty.