Thinking Outside the Box

Thinking Outside the Box                            

So Many Kinds of Salsa!

Pasta, especially in what I believe is its most popular form, spaghetti, is a mainstay of Italian life.  And although I don’t get excited over the nature of the spaghetti strands that fill the boxes lining our market shelves, my enjoyment lies in the sauces we make to go along with these fabulous threads.  There are many toppings available to cap-off a plate of spaghetti.  Before arriving at my main topic, here are just a few of these noteworthy, yummy concoctions, oftentimes referred to as salsa (sauce) or sugo (gravy) by Italians:

Carbonara is more than Alfredo sauce, far beyond a simple bechamel.  This creamy sauce includes lightly whisked eggs, parmesan cheese, bacon, and pepper tossed with the pasta just before serving.  The trick is not to scramble the eggs!

 

Classic Bolognese

Ragù alla Bolognese is possibly the best-known Italian pasta sauce.  This slow-cooked meat sauce, typical of the city of Bologna, is definitely my kind of comfort food, being the carnivore I am.  There are endless variations on the Bolognese theme, each differing by an alteration in preparation.  Ingredients can include slowly cooked chopped onions, carrots, and celery, called a soffritto, along with finely chopped beef often alongside small amounts of fatty pork and veal. White milk definitely and sometimes wine is added along with tomato paste.  When you can find it, be sure to try it. 

Arrabiata is another of my favs.  No reason you can’t have more than one, right?  This sauce, which originates from the Lazio region around Rome, especially wakes-up my taste buds.  It literally means ‘angry’ in Italian which refers to its spiciness due to the dried red chili peppers and garlic cooked along with tomatoes in olive oil.  It is usually served with penne pasta.

 

Pesto also makes my list.  Classic Italian pesto combines basil, olive oil, pignoli pine nuts, parmesan cheese, and hails from Genoa, where the best basil in Italy is said to grow.  The ancient Romans used to eat a similar paste called moretum.  Moretum was originally prepared with a tool to pulverize the ingredients and is the likely origin of the word mortar.

 

A Classic Puttanesca Sauce

Puttanesca: Fans of salty flavors will love the combination of black olives, anchovies, and capers that characterize this quick and tangy sauce.  It is sometimes better known by the title, ‘Prostitute's Sauce.’  How such a name came to be is not clear.  Some claim it originated in the brothels of the dense Spanish Quarter of Naples.  A more conventional narrative claims it was invented out of necessity in the 1950s in a restaurant on the island of Ischia in the Bay of Naples, another of our favored haunts.  Tradition says that one night a group of hungry customers asked the owner, who was out of ingredients, to make “una puttanata qualsias.”  While the word “puttanata” meant whore, its implication was to throw together whatever ingredients he could muster to make something simple, though understandably a close but unworthy representation of the real thing.

 

Vongole in Italian means clams.  Briny clams, spicy red chili, and fragrant parsley come together here in another classic Neapolitan creation which can be quickly whipped together in a little over the time it will take to boil water for the pasta.  Use quarter-size verace clams if you can find them or Manila clams as a substitute.  Most versions contain nothing more than garlic, red pepperoncino chili pepper, white wine, olive oil, and parsley.  Here is how we make it (isn’t there a song

Pasta a la Vongole

like that?); To a large skillet add chopped garlic and sauté it in olive oil.  Add some pepperoncino.  Now turn up the heat on the skillet mixture and add some wine.  Allow a minute or so for the alcohol to burn off then add the clams to your mix.  Occasionally stir everything together until the clams all open.  Discard those that don’t open.  Meanwhile, boil your spaghetti until a little more than al dente.  Now instead of draining the pasta, tong it into the skillet and add the chopped parsley, moving everything around until you find the spaghetti is right for eating.  Ecco!  For added flavor, Maria Elena will scissor the parsley stems as well and add them to the mix.  We love this easy-to-make dish especially when home in Italy where I can walk uptown to “Pescheria del Gargano” where Adriana serves me fresh ladlefuls of tasty verace bivalves from their watery baths and includes a sprig or two of fresh parsley.  

Aglio e Olio literally means “garlic and oil” in Italian.  It is another traditional pasta recipe from Naples.  This dish is made by sautéing sliced garlic in olive oil, sometimes with the addition of red pepper flakes, or anchovies.  In the case of Aglio e Olio, we are flagrant violators of Italian rules of culinary etiquette for at times we will introduce shrimp or mushrooms.  We would never serve it to Italian guests, however.  If ever caught, our planned mea culpa would take the form of “a slip of the hand,” an irresponsible oversight, or all else failing, a claim of l'ignoranza di uno straniero (the ignorance of a foreigner). 

It's surprising how many of these sauces originated in Naples.  And there are plenty of others like Marinara, thought to have debuted when ‘New World’ tomatoes first arrived in Naples, simple Cacio e Pepe and what’s called “a heart attack on a plate”, Fettuccine alfredo sauce … 1200 calories, 75 grams of fat, 47 grams of saturated fat and more than half a day's worth of sodium.  Beyond mention of its name, I’ll skip this one completely. 

These classic sauces have now gained worldwide notoriety.  Nowadays, they serve as the nitty-gritty of any Italian restaurant’s menu.  Keeping with the phrase “familiarity breeds contempt”, first used by the Roman writer Publilius and thousands of years later by Chaucer, repeated contact with anything, including a pasta’s salsa, can wear on its satisfaction.  Too much of the same, over and over, especially on that Italian culinary altar, the kitchen table, where it materializes daily, can anesthetize the palate.  Excitement over its texture, aroma, and flavor can wane and lead to, if not to finding fault, then to a drab sense of mediocrity.  Where is the excitement brought on by a new pasta sauce?  I went bonkers with enthusiasm once when a neighbor served up a sauce that included, can you imagine, cumin, with a bag of frozen chicken wings thrown in the sauce to slowly cook just like her mom taught her to make in Columbia.  Now that was something delightfully different.  How about something like that, a sauce and pasta combo that trashes all the rules?  Not creative enough to invent one myself, I was lucky to stumble upon an obscure recipe practically shrouded in a cult-following.  I set about making it, less any cumin or wings at least for now.

Regarding matters like these, I dabble in the kitchen with Maria Elena’s pots and pans but am no chef.  Instead, I recruited the help of our daughter, Jamie.  The idea to enlist her help occurred to me

Rising from the Refrigerator's Ashes,
Jamie's Riso al Salto

when she stopped by with a luncheon treat for us.  She had taken leftover risotto and fried it like a pancake in olive oil then served it with rocket in a mix of balsamic vinegar and baklouti green chili pepper infused olive oil all topped with a dusting of parmigiano-reggiano cheese.  It was a takeoff on the Milanese classic Riso al Salto where I’m guessing salto, meaning jump, is akin to my analogy of flipping a flapjack.  Jamie loves to cook, which in these days at home only adds to my COVID waistline, call it “COVID-10”, meaning pounds.  She finds it a calming way to creatively express herself and offset the stress from teaching algebra to pubescent teens.  Whoever said stress never pays off?  Her stress certainly does for this mom and dad.

Why not take a try at making pasta in a hot cast iron skillet and forget entirely about boiling the pasta or whipping up a soffritto?  Crazy, right?  These alone are major rule breakers, a perfect opening gambit for a rogue like me.  This nearly forgotten discovery originated in down-under Italy.  At first, I suspected Sicily, but I was off by hundreds of miles.  I needed to

Port City of Bari

go farther east to the high-heel of undiscovered Puglia, where the cuisine is astonishingly rich, incredibly varied, and intensely regionalized.  To precisely arrive at its origin, we must travel to the coastal city of Bari, where this pasta’s reputation approaches religious fervor.  It is there that we find Spaghetti All'Assassina or ‘Killer’s Pasta.’  It made its public debut by chance sometime toward the end of the 1960s at Al Sorso Preferito (The Favorite Sip), a 

Puglia (in White)

restaurant in an ancient building with vaulted ceilings in Bari's center at number 40, Via Vito Nicola De Nicolò.  It is a two-hour drive from our home in Calitri to this mecca of Apulian specialties in the elegant Murat district and a block or so away from Bari’s splendid seafront promenade.  Bari used to own a tough reputation on par with rough and tumble Naples but as its sister city on the opposite coast has cleaned up its act, so has Bari.  “Until 20 years ago, Old Bari was known as “Mugging-town,” a forbidden zone run by criminal clans. Theft has a long tradition here.” ¹  Cleaning up Bari was like trying to straighten the Leaning Tower of Pisa.  While neither has become perfectly straight, both are much improved.  Well enough that cruise ships now disgorge thousands of tourists with each visit.  Why bother to forcibly take from tourists when they’ll gladly give it to you.

According to Spaghetti all’Assassina lore, its appearance wasn’t new but more a rediscovery, something on the order of opening up a time capsule.  When the Sorso Preferito owners decided to

Where the Recipe was Found

expand through the wall into an adjacent property, they stumbled upon a hand-written recipe for this peculiar pasta and sauce combo and decided to give it a try.  From there, it spread to the point that today it has a following not yet with university status but getting there with two dedicated “academies” of its own.  Other than rigidly sticking to the academy’s ‘open cookbook test,’ there is no tuition to attend.  When it comes to this dish, its members are devotees and experts.  Through monthly meetings, their aim is to preserve and teach this tradition.  The feeling is that with globalization closing in, they must work to transfer these essential culinary traditions to follow-on generations.  Working toward this goal involves promoting its appreciation, all the while zealously guarding its unique preparation.  Killer’s Pasta, a dish fit for all of us, assassins and prostitutes as well, is one such tradition worth sustaining.

Speaking of essentials, a requirement not to be ignored is the use of an iron pan.  Its devotees are unwavering when it comes to cooking Assassina in such a pan.  Something on the order of a black cast iron skillet will do.  This indispensable tool should be wide enough to accommodate a handful of dry pasta lying flush on the bottom, without God forbid, any need to snap it to fit.  An iron pan offers better heat conduction which is important in preparing Killer’s Pasta.  But there is a catch for zealot purists.  This oiled, burnt frying pan is never washed but rather cleaned with newspaper so that it stays greasy.  A little printer’s ink shouldn’t bother anyone, right?  Another more humongous distinction is that instead of boiling the spaghetti, it is cooked directly in the pan by consistently adding a watery broth to it each time the liquid is absorbed.  It is a technique similar to making risotto, where in this case the spaghetti is rehydrated.  All this is minor, however.  Proper pan in hand and mindful of the broth technique, it is also of utmost importance that the plated result be burnt, crispy, and spicy.  I’m serious.  Thinking “outside the box” as they say, the use of pasta right out of the box confirms that despite what many may believe, spaghetti all'assassina wasn't created as a way to use leftover pasta as is often the case with a makeshift pasta frittata where a crispy crunch can also be expected.  How is that for one novel, diabolical dish? 

Besides the “Al Sorso Favorite,” birthplace and mecca of this dish, here are a few other Bari restaurants, each rigorously approved for their authenticity by the Accademia all'Assassina, where you can play assassin at your table:

La Battigia – reports say the execution is to die for.

Chez Jo – Spaghetti alla Assasina … €8.00 at last count.

Gola Gourmet Kitchen – here the killer’s spaghetti remains faithful to tradition, never too dry, burnt, or salted.

So much for preliminaries.  How precisely is this concoction made?  It’s nothing complex or

Basement Crime Scene

layered, actually rather simple.  So, “This Is How We Do It”  (I knew there was a related tune.  Here, post ad, is the hip-hop hit by Montell Jordan).  With that now out of my system, Jamie and I headed to our basement kitchen.  In premeditated fashion, we brought along enough ingredients to prepare this killer’s dish for four people.

            12 oz.   Spaghetti (avoid super starchy pastas.  This recipe actually requires a low quality (i.e., less starchy) pasta.  We used  

easy to find Barilla.

2 cups   Tomato purée (passata).

12 oz   Tomato paste.

1/2 cup   Extra virgin olive oil.

2   Garlic cloves

1  tsp  Sugar (optional)

Ground pepperoncino chili pepper (we prefer it over scissoring

The Bloody Broth

tiny chili peppers).

Salt

·         Water is used of course but to make a watery broth, nowhere near as substantial as a regular sauce.  In a saucepan, prepare the broth made with five ladles (about 20 oz.) of water.  Add a pinch of salt to 1 cup purée and plenty of tomato paste.  Stir and bring to a simmer.  With an assassin’s mischief in mind, it must remain a broth, bloody red in color yet tasty.

·         With the assassin’s bloody ‘wet work’ completed, to your large iron skillet (we used cast iron) add

Preparing the Crime Scene
(Garlic, Oil & Pepperoncino)

½ cup of olive oil, 2 garlic cloves (1 whole and 1 chopped), and pepperoncino to taste. 

NOTE: To fully experience this fiery dish, the spaghetti is premeditatedly tortured to a brutale (brutal) demise.  The exact nature of “execution” depends on how much fiery pepperoncino is used along with the degree of singeing.  Whether the hots are generous or a light dusting, the taste is spellbinding.  This is certainly a murderous situation that pasta makers like Buitoni, De Cecco, or Barilla, to name a few, never envisioned their humble pastas would have to suffer.

Heat this mixture over a high flame until the garlic turns golden and sizzle.  Remove the whole garlic clove.  Now pour in the remaining tomato purée and let it reduce slightly.  To lessen the acidity from the tomatoes, you might add 1 tsp. of sugar. 

·         Spread the dry spaghetti strands like “pick-up sticks” in an even layer on top of the mixture.  We pressed it down to help the pasta

Right Out of the Box
Spaghetti Strands

sink into the tomato purée sauce.

·         Now let patience take control.  Step back, wait.  The goal is to let the pasta burn and blacken slightly on the bottom before flipping it over to sear the other side.  Don't be in a hurry to flip everything.  You must wait for some of the spaghetti to start caramelizing.

·         When the spaghetti begins to stick to the bottom of the pan, get under the spaghetti with a spatula and flip it over, repeating the process on the other side.

·         Now the killer strikes again by adding two medium-sized ladles of the bloody broth.  The liquid will sizzle and start to simmer as it is absorbed by the pasta.  Let it reduce without turning the spaghetti and "listen" for the boiling point.  When you hear it
sizzle, keep your distance and wait for the "burning" process to continue (this will take 30 seconds to 1 minute).  We could actually smell the burning.

The First Flip

·         Loosening the burnt spaghetti from the bottom of the pan, flip it again.  When the moisture from the broth has nearly evaporated add another ladle of tomato broth.

·         With each additional ladle, wait the necessary time for it to sizzle and then repeat by dousing the pasta with more broth.  The spaghetti will begin to soften and bend as this process continues.  As it softens, the pasta can be gently stirred until it acquires a dark crust.  Taste it occasionally until you find it is al dente  By the end, the spaghetti will have a gory appearance, scorched and crispy with the semblance of clotted blood.  Please don’t call 911 (112 in Italy), you’re doing fine.

The Finished Dish

·         The whole process takes about 8-9 minutes for the pasta must suffer.  The result is a dish with a far different consistency than boiled spaghetti.  There is of course the crunch of the burnt spaghetti strands, but the added uniqueness lies in the added flavor absorbed into the pasta strands, something boiling spaghetti in water then pouring on the sauce can’t match.

Serve it when you think it's ready – go rustico and bring the pan
directly to the table.  You’ll need to experiment and decide on the level of searing and spiciness you enjoy.  And there you have it, an intense, passionate food experience not easily forgotten by adventurous eaters even well after the last of the killer’s handiwork is consumed. 

Jamie Plates the First Serving

As two platefuls will attest to, I absolutely loved it.  It is a kind of soul food from Italy's deep south and a must-try treat for pasta enthusiasts who enjoy breaking the rules. 

Live if you can and learn.  Little did I realize many years back that there was a limit to how long you could boil spaghetti.  Only when it basically disintegrated into a mushy white lump did I realize that wasn’t how mom cooked it.  This was on the equivalent of how I once inflated my bike tires, not realizing that tires could only take as much pressure as is clearly printed on the side of a tire.  Thank God the resultant rubber shrapnel from the explosion missed me.  In my case, it was not necessarily the survival of the fittest but the dumbest by unnatural selection.  In any case, with my earlier pasta debacles behind me, I now have an excuse any time I scorch spaghetti.  While I might enjoy thinking I was breaking the rules, on the contrary, having made Spaghetti All'Assassina, I’m right in step with the culinary convictions of Bari's finest pasta academics.  So, if you ever cruise into Bari, 

Kitchen Accomplice, Paolo,
Enthusiastically Enjoys Plate
#1

forget about eating aboard ship, instead head to one of these shrines to a pasta tradition.  If instead you’re driving along SS-16, why not plan a brief detour into Bari.  And if you happen to stop off at Al Sorso Preferito (The Favorite Sip) for their crispy forkfuls, please do me a favor.  Be sure to suggest that they rename the place Il Masticare Preferito dell'Assassino (The Assassin’s Favorite Chew).

 

From That Rogue Tourist 

Paolo

1.       “Call It a Crime of Pasta” - The New York Times, Dec 8, 2019