Pasta with Braised Bacon & Roasted Tomato Sauce from The Zuni Café Cookbook p 205. The recipe is available online at this link.
This is a delicious, rustic and intensely flavorful pasta dish, basically a version of Pasta All'Amatriciana. The roasted tomato sauce is a keeper - a great, quick way to concentrate the flavor of canned tomatoes. Earlier in this topic, @snowangel raved about the braised bacon, suggesting its marvelous aroma may have helped sell her house and @sammy declared it the best bacon dish ever. In my opinion, the best bacon is perfectly cooked to shattering crispness in a perfect summertime BLT and there are easier and quicker ways to achieve the porky component in this dish than braising slab bacon for hours.
The header notes say that guanciale was not available so the braised bacon was a substitute. It's much more readily available today so that would be an easy sub as would her suggested shortcut of using little strips of thickly sliced bacon - I'd soak the slices in water for a bit if it's a particularly smoky sort. I found a blog post that suggested just cooking the onions in rendered bacon fat to add that porky flavor for a very shortcut version.
If you do decide to braise the bacon, do it a day ahead or early in the day as it takes some time and really needs to chill down thoroughly before you can slice it easily. The book says to brown the bacon "until slightly colored, a few minutes at most," but because I am appalled by pale, flabby pork fat on my plate, I let it crisp up nicely. Perhaps inappropriate for the dish, but very appropriate for this diner.
I used bucatini as the pasta and sprinkled the dish with plenty of black pepper and pecorino romano (I love Judy's description of its flavor as "salty and feral") I made full batches of the sauce and the braised bacon, which is called for in several other recipes in the book, used what I needed and will save the leftovers from each separately.
