I had a craving for pasta, specifically fusilli, but I didn’t want to spend a lot of time making a sauce since there was none at the ready. How would fusilli work with aglio e olio …
As an aside, fusilli is quickly becoming one of my fvorite pasta shapes. The size is perfect for me, I love the texture of the pasta as it’s chewed, and the ridges do a pretty good job of holding most sauces. Good enough for this poor dirt farmer from NYC.
I broke out the new, deeper 12-inch skillet and added about 2½ quarts of filtered water and a big dollop of Diamond Crystal Salt. I grabbed the last of the DeCecco fusilli from its resting place alongside the microwave oven, where several other pastas are also stored.
While the water was heating, the sauce started to come together. Some Rancho Milagro EVOO went into a 10 inch skillet and, seeing some beautiful Italian anchovy fillets in the fridge I decided to add them to the aglio e olio, and when that decision was made, I decided to just riff a simple sauce leaving the aglio e olio as primarily a building block. I added enough anchovy to, hopefully, be just barely noticeable in the background, or at least that was the intention.
About three large cloves of pressed garlic were added to the anchovies cooking at a medium temp. The garlic sizzled a bit when it hit the oil so I immediately added a little less than ¼ cup of water from the container on the stove. There's always water handy to add to cooking garlic to reduce or eliminate its tendency to burn.
Next came the Aleppo pepper, two generous teaspoons of that lovely, flavorful pepper. That was cooked together with the garlic for a while, and the oil tasted for intensity and flavor. The garlic seemed to be fine, but a bit more Aleppo was required … not too much, though.
And then the riff continued. A couple of tablespoons of Mutti Triple Concentrated tomato paste was added and cooked to a brick red color with the oil and other ingredients. Tasting told me I was on to something, but more was needed, and I imagined a kind of funky pork flavor as being a good addition to this , and so I added just about 1½ tablespoons of ’nduja (https://ndujausa.com/). The whole thing came together nicely.
By the time the sauce was ready, the pasta was done. I pulled some pasta water from the skillet, drained the fusilli, and dumped it into the sauce, adding a bit less than ¼ cup of the starchy pasta liquid. When the stirring and mixing gave me the creaminess I wanted, I turned off the heat and removed the pan from the hob. It was time to add the cheese, a blend of Pecorino Romano and a lovely Grana Padano from a local, old school Italian deli.
Lunch was a delight.
