Sicilian · Main
Pasta con le Sarde
- Intermediate
- 45 min
- roughly 4 of 4 for cost
Leads with a briny, maritime salinity, savory depth stacked from the pantry’s bass notes, trailing gentle sweetness.
Ingredients
- 400g bucatini
- 500g fresh sardines, scaled and filleted (about 300g clean fillet)
- 300g wild fennel fronds (finocchietto selvatico)
- 200g white onion, sliced thin
- 60g sultanas (uva passa), soaked 20 minutes in warm water
- 50g pine nuts
- 6 salted anchovy fillets, rinsed and chopped
- 0.2g saffron threads
- 80ml extra virgin olive oil
- 60g coarse dry breadcrumbs, for the muddica atturrata
- 1 tbsp olive oil, for the muddica
- coarse salt
The skills inside
Dry-pan toasting: spices, seeds and nutsSweating aromatics: soft, never brownedSalted water & the float testKeeping the cooking liquid
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · nuts · fish
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Boil the wild fennel in 3 litres of heavily salted water for 10 minutes, until the stems collapse under the back of a spoon; lift it out, squeeze it, chop it, and keep every drop of the green water. 10 min
- Sweat the onion in the olive oil over low heat for 12 minutes until it is translucent and slumped with no colour at the edges, then melt in the anchovy until the oil smells of the sea. 12 min
- Add the pine nuts, drained sultanas, chopped fennel and the saffron loosened in a ladle of the fennel water, lay the sardine fillets on top and cook 6 minutes without stirring, until they turn from glassy to opaque and fall apart when nudged. 6 min
- Toast the breadcrumbs in a dry pan with the spoon of oil, tossing until they are the colour of dark honey and rattle loose, then tip them straight onto a cold plate.
- Cook the bucatini in the fennel water, drain it two minutes short and finish it in the pan with a ladle of that water until the strands are lacquered and no liquid pools underneath; scatter the muddica at the table, not before.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Keeping the cooking liquid 60 recipes
- It was actually kept: the liquid went into a container rather than down the drain, and the volume saved is enough to be worth using.
- It is clean: strained of solids and grit, and not clouded with the debris of whatever broke up in it.
- It tastes of what it cooked and tastes concentrated rather than washed out, and it is not so salty or so bitter that the only honest use is the bin.
- It was cooled quickly and stored cold, not left standing warm on the stove to be dealt with later.
- Used, it does the job the dish gives it (carrying flavour into a sauce, loosening the dish, or setting when chilled) rather than merely adding water back.
Where it goes wrong The pot was left to cool slowly on the stove and only strained the next day, so it soured overnight: what should have been the best ingredient in the dish goes in the bin, and the recipe gets water instead.
Dry-pan toasting: spices, seeds and nuts 70 recipes
- A single layer on dry metal with nothing added: no fat, and nothing else sharing the pan or the tray and competing for the heat.
- It is kept moving: shaken, stirred, or turned. Anything left still scorches on the face touching the metal while the rest of it is barely warm.
- It is judged by smell before sight: once it is fragrant there are seconds left, not minutes, and the nose reaches that point well before the colour does.
- It leaves the pan the instant it is done, onto a cold surface. A hot pan keeps toasting whatever stays in it, and carryover here is the difference between done and ruined.
- The colour is even and light rather than patchy, with nothing black at the edges: one scorched piece taints the whole quantity it is ground into.
Where it goes wrong It was left alone for a moment while something else was attended to. Dry heat has no margin: the pieces against the metal go from fragrant to acrid inside a minute, and the bitterness cannot be picked back out of a ground mixture.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Fino or Manzanilla Sherry
- Also Right
- Muscadet or dry Riesling
- From the Taps
- Pilsner
- Zero-Proof
- Sparkling water with lemon
Salt-cured fish wants a bone-dry, saline partner: Sherry and Atlantic whites answer the cure without fighting it.
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