Pasta with Sausage and Tomatoes
I wanted to make a pasta dish Sunday for dinner and since I had just recently made and frozen a large batch of Italian sausage, Sandy suggested I defrost a few and make pasta with sausage. Great idea! I used sweet sausage for this but if you want to go spicier you can use hot sausage or increase the amount of red pepper flakes.
Serves 4-6
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 medium sweet onion, diced
1 pound sweet Italian sausage meat (stuffing from 4 links)
1/2 teaspoon red pepper flakes
salt to taste
1 35oz can of imported Italian tomatoes
6 fresh basil leaves
1 pound mezzi rigatoni
- Heat olive oil in a medium sauce pan over medium-high heat. Add onion and sautè, stirring occasionally with a wooden spoon until softened and translucent, about 5 minutes.
- Add sausage meat, red pepper and salt to taste. Cook, stirring occasionally until sausage is browned approximately 10 minutes.
- In a large bowl, crush the tomatoes with your hands then add them with their juices to the pan. Add 1/2 cup of water and bring to a simmer. Turn heat to low and let simmer until thickened, about 45 minutes. At the very end of cooking, tear 2 of the basil leaves into pieces with your hands and stir into the sauce.
- While sauce is cooking, bring a large pot of salted water to a boil and add the mezzi rigatoni. Cook uncovered over high heat until al dente.
- Drain the pasta and toss with half of the sauce. Dish pasta out into individual serving plates, top with a little more sauce, garnish with the remaining basil leaves torn by hand and serve.
Fresh Italian Sausage
I have been making my own sausage for a few years now, ever since I picked up the book Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing
My Fresh Italian Sausage recipe is actually a hybrid of the Sweet Italian Sausage recipe in Charcuterie and the Fresh Italian Sausage recipe from another book in my library, Cooking by Hand
There several keys to making a good sausage that both books share. The first key is keeping your meat and fat cold. If it gets too warm during the process, the fat will separate from the meat and you will end up with a crumbly sausage. Tips that I picked up from both books are putting the meat in the freezer after I cut it up until it’s almost frozen, putting the auger, dies, blades, etc from your grinder in the freezer to get cold before grinding, and grinding the meat into a bowl set in ice.
Also very important is the addition of fat. Fat makes the sausage juicy, and a good Italian sausage must have a certain percentage of fat. Back fat is not an easy ingredient to get a hold of, so you may be tempted to exclude it from this recipe and just use 5 pounds of pork shoulder, but trust me I have tried it and the results just aren’t the same. Talk to your butcher and see if they can special order it for you, or you can order it online from a source like Niman Ranch. Speaking of sources, you can get the hog casings from Butcher & Packer.
The last key to a good sausage is after it is made; cooking the final product. A lot of people have a tendency to overcook sausage. A sausage should be cooked to a temperature of 150 degrees. Charcuterie suggests using a meat thermometer to check the temperature. I would never tell you to stand there like a dork at your grill sticking a meat thermometer in individual sausages. Just use common sense and judgment, if it’s cooked a little over 150 it’s no big deal, but you can tell when you are absolutely killing it… just stop yourself.
As far as equipment goes, I use the meat grinder attachment for my KitchenAide stand mixer to grind the meat, into the mixer bowl, then mix the ground meat with the ice cold liquid using the paddle attachment. I initially used the sausage stuffer that attaches to the grinder, but was not happy with that for several reasons, not the least of which is that going through the auger heats it up and increases your risk of “breaking” the sausage. I ended up buying this 5 pound sausage stuffer
Fresh Italian Sausage
Adapted from Charcuterie and Cooking by Hand
Makes 5 pounds of sausage
4 pounds/800 grams boneless pork shoulder butt
1 pound/450 grams pork back fat
3 tablespoons kosher salt
2 tablespoons granulated sugar
2 teaspoons minced garlic
2 tablespoons fennel seeds, toasted
2 teaspoons coarsely ground black pepper
1-1/2 tablespoons dried sage
1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper
1 cup ice water
10 feet hog casings, soaked in tepid water for at least 30 minutes, then flushed with running water
- Cut the pork and fat into roughly 1 inch dice, and mix together in a bowl. Cover the bowl and place it in the freezer for approximately 30 minutes, it will feel nearly frozen.
- Remove the meat from the freezer and combine well with the rest of the ingredients, except the water.
- Grind the meat through a 1/4 inch plate, the large die if you are using the KitchenAide grinder attachment, into a bowl set in ice.
- Add the water to the meat mixture and mix with the paddle attachment of the stand mixer for about 1 minute on medium speed. The mixture should be thoroughly combined and quite sticky.
- Immediately stuff the sausage into the hog casings, pinch and and twist to form 6-inch links. Alternately, you can shape the sausage into patties. The sausage can now be refrigerated or wrapped well and frozen until ready to cook.
Puglia: A Culinary Memoir
The first book in the new Italy’s Food Culture series of cookbooks, translated from the original Italian, by Oronzo Editions, Puglia: A Culinary Memoir
The cooking of Puglia started out as “cucina povera”, or peasant cooking, but has evolved into a substantial cuisine that still retains the character of the region. Referred to as “Italy’s California”, the land in Puglia is bountiful, and the cooking is rooted in the crops that are grown locally. In keeping with that, there is a big emphasis in this book on vegetable dishes. If you are an eggplant fan there is a treasure trove of great eggplant recipes, such as Baked Eggplant with Olives, Eggplant “Meatballs”, Eggplant Mushroom-Style, and one of the recipes we are featuring, Eggplant Rollups.
While vegetables are the star here, they are not the only reason to read this book. There are some great pasta dishes, especially for the typical pasta of the region, Orecchiette, including Oricchiette with Brocoli Rabe. Due to the prevalence of olive oil in the region, there is a large variety of fried foods in Puglia, which gives us an amazing chapter on Fritters and Turnovers.
The book is rounded out with chapters on chicken, pork and lamb as well as fish and shellfish, all interspersed with informative entries on subjects like the farmhouse, olive trees and Christmas traditions. As with most cookbooks originally written in Italian, the recipes assume some mastery of cooking in general and are not as detailed or explicit as American audiences usually expect, but in the translation Oronzo has beefed up the cooking instructions and clarified ingredient amounts.
The Italy’s Food Culture series has gotten off to a great start, featuring two underappreciated regions of Italy, Puglia and Sicily. I am looking forward to the future volumes planned and seeing how they handle some of the more familiar cuisines like Florence, Venice and Reggio Emilia.
Recipes:
