Erica De Mane

Recipe below: Saffron Tagliatelle with Sausage-and-Fennel Ragù

A storm is coming. Snow, lots of it. I usually love that, but now I fear it’ll just add to the current confinement of our lives. So I’m thinking about flavors. Fennel, saffron, and rosemary. What does combining those three things sound like to you? Good, weird, stupid? If you’ve never tried it, I think you should. There’s a touch of magic in it. You know how some flavor combinations produce a taste distinct from their parts, a new flavor, such as when you mix various spices to create a curry? This is not one of those instances. When you blend fennel, saffron, and rosemary, you still taste each distinctly. Not much melding. Which is, in this case, beauty. It’s hard to understand why curries blend so readily. Possibly because most of the spices have similar strengths. With these three, I think rosemary is so strong and resiny that it stands up well against the fennel and saffron, refusing to give in. And fennel and saffron, while milder, are also two really specific, unusual hits on the palate.

The pasta sauce I’ve made with this combo is a variation on a Sardinian creation I first learned about from Giuliano Bugialli’s book The Foods of Sicily and Sardinia. It’s most often tossed with malloreddus, a type of semolina gnocchi. I’ve made malloreddus, but it’s kind of a pain in the ass, so I didn’t bother this time. Instead I rolled out semolina-and-saffron tagliatelle. Semolina dough is really easy to work with. I just spun out the pasta with my old hand-cranked pasta machine. It was a pleasure to make, and it’s a lovely thing to have for the big snow that’s coming. Now I’m getting excited about the snow. My plan is to have this for dinner and then go marching down 13th Street in the fluffy, not-yet-filth-covered powder.

Saffron Tagliatelle with Sausage-and-Fennel Ragù

(Serves 4)

For the tagliatelle:

3 cups semolina flour, plus more for kneading and rolling
1 teaspoon salt
A big pinch of saffron threads, dried and ground in a mortar and pestle
About 1½ cups warm water

For the ragù:

1 cup good-quality chicken broth
A big pinch of saffron threads, dried and ground with a mortar and pestle
Extra-virgin olive oil
1 round of pancetta, ¼ inch thick, chopped
4 Italian sweet sausages, with fennel seeds if possible, the skins removed and discarded
About 20 fennel seeds, ground with a mortar and pestle (maybe a little less if there’s lots of fennel in your sausage)
1 large onion, chopped
2 garlic cloves, thinly sliced
The leaves from a long sprig of rosemary, chopped
Sea salt
A crumbled dried hot red chili
A big splash of white wine
1 35-ounce can good Italian tomatoes, chopped, with the juice
½ cup cream
A big chunk of Pecorino Sardo cheese

To make the pasta, get out a large bowl, and pour in the semolina. Add the salt, and stir it around to distribute it.  In another bowl, add the saffron to the warm water, letting it dissolve for a minute. Pour that into the bowl with the semolina, and mix everything around with a spoon until you have sticky mass. Work it with your hands just to bring everything together into a ball.

Pour a good amount of semolina out onto a work surface, and turn the dough out onto it. Coat your hands well with semolina, and start kneading until the dough is smooth and softly springs back when you give it a poke. This will take 8 minutes or so, so just zone into it. Add more semolina whenever it gets sticky. When the dough is nice and smooth, wrap it in plastic, and let it rest for an hour.

Divide the dough into quarters, and keeping the pieces you’re not immediately working with wrapped in plastic. Dust your pasta machine with semolina, and start running a piece of dough through until you’re down to the next-to-last setting. It’ll get pretty long, so you’ll probably want to cut it in half at some point. Do this with all the dough. Then lay out the sheets on a semolina-dusted counter or table. Let them dry for about 20 minutes so they can firm up a bit.

Get out 2 sheet pans, and dust them with semolina. Run the pasta sheets through your pasta machine on the tagliatelle setting. Place the tagliatelle on the sheet pans as they come out of the machine, sprinkling semolina over them to coat them well. You can arrange them in loose bundles. If you’ve got enough semolina on them, they won’t stick together. The pasta can sit this way for a few hours.

To make the ragù, dissolve the ground saffron in the chicken broth, and set it aside.

Get a big saucepan hot over medium heat. Drizzle in a tablespoon of olive oil. Add the pancetta, and let it brown. Add the sausage, the fennel seeds, and the onion, and let them all brown lightly, about 5 minutes. Add the rosemary and the dried chili, and season everything with a little salt.

Add the wine, and let it bubble for a few seconds. Add the tomatoes and the saffron chicken broth. Bring to a boil. Then turn down the heat, cover the pan, and let the sauce simmer for about an hour. Then remove it from the heat, and stir in the cream.

Set up a big pot of pasta cooking water, and bring it to a boil. Add the tagliatelle, and cook it until it all floats to the top, probably 4 or 5 minutes.

Reheat the sauce and taste it for seasoning.

Drain the tagliatelle, saving about ½ cup of the cooking water.

Pour the tagliatelle into a large serving bowl. Pour the sauce over the pasta. Add a little of the cooking water if you need to thin it. Grate on a bit of the pecorino, and give everything a good toss. Bring the rest of the cheese to the table.