Recipe: Rigatoni all'Amatriciana
11/5/2015

I'm seeing food recipes pop up in otherwise news/technical/rant blogs, so since I'm an *excellent* cook (or maybe it was mediocre cook, I forget), I thought I'd share one of my favorite dishes.


Ingredients

  • 1.5 lbs dry rigatoni. Any short tubular pasta will work here, however.
  • 1 28-ounce can of whole peeled tomatoes , preferably San Marzano (yes, they do taste different)
  • 10 ounces of thick-cut (1/4 inch) pancetta. The authentic recipe actually calls for a fatty section of the pig's cheek called guanciale, but since guanciale is almost impossible to find outside of Italy and the most hardcore Italian markets, pancetta can serve as a perfectly good alternative.
  • 4 large cloves of garlic, peeled
  • ~1/8th of a large red onion
  • 1/4 cup of dry white wine. Pinot grigio works fine.
  • ~8 ounces of pecorino romano cheese, grated. I generally use about half of a standard wedge, but cheese is really to taste in this case.
  • 2 tbsp olive oil
  • Salt, fresh black pepper, and red pepper flakes, all to taste

Prep

  1. Mash/process/blend tomatoes and garlic to your desired chunkiness, and set aside. I like less chunks, so I usually run them through a food processor on high for ~15 seconds

  2. Chop pancetta into small bits, about 1/4 inch x 1/4 inch x 1/2 inch. The smaller the better here. Set aside.

  3. Slice onion lengthwise into very thin ribbons. The onion is just a flavoring agent here and shouldn't be very present in each bite, so the thinner the better.

Cook

  1. Put olive oil and pancetta in a medium-large pan on medium heat. Heat and stir until just before the pancetta crisps, ~10-15 minutes. What you're doing here is extracting the fat from the meat by melting it, which will mix with the tomatoes and flavor the sauce. The point at which the pancetta starts to crisp is when all of the fat has been extracted.

  2. Add onion to the oil/pancetta mix, and pour in white wine. The white wine is to de-glaze the bottom of the pan, so scrape off the bits left behind from the pancetta with a wooden spoon.

  3. Once the alcohol has evaporated from the wine (the point at which you stop smelling alcohol), pour the tomatoes/garlic into the pan. Turn down the heat to medium-low, and simmer uncovered for 45 minutes, stirring every 5-10 minutes. We're trying to boil off some water and thicken the sauce here.

  4. With 20 minutes left on the simmer, get some water boiling in a large pot for the pasta. Pasta boxes will generally give a range for the boiling time, and you should boil for the time on the bottom end of this range, e.g. if it says 10-12 minutes, boil for 10 minutes.

  5. With 5 minutes left on the simmer, add the salt, black pepper, and red pepper flakes, and stir. When the 45 minutes is up, turn off heat.

  6. When the pasta is done boiling, drain, and transfer back into the same pot.

  7. Pour sauce into pot on top of pasta, add the cheese, and stir until the sauce and cheese are evenly distributed.

This will feed 4-6 people, or 2-3 people for dinner and lunch the next day. All in all this should be about an hour long process. It requires some time and attention, but it's exceedingly simple and exceedingly delicious. Enjoy!