Pasta con le Sarde - How to Make Sicilian-Style Pasta with Sardines and Fennel

hello this is chef john from food wishes comm with pasta colas our day that's right we're doing Sicilies famous pasta with a sauce of sardines and fennel and i'm looking forward to showing you my version of it oh by the way some of my friends in sicily had a message for me to give to you they said if you make this pasta please use Sicilian olive oil it's good for you actually hold on I didn't get that right the exact phrasing was you Sicilian olive oil if you know what's good for you alright that makes more sense but anyway let's get started and last things first this unbelievably delicious pasta gets finished with a topping of crispy fried bread crumbs so we'll set a pan on medium heat and we'll toss in a few handfuls of fresh breadcrumbs along with a generous drizzle of the aforementioned extra-virgin olive oil and all we're going to do is toast those crumbs until they're golden brown and crispy and please don't use any of those dried crumbs out of the canister so just crumble up some fresh or stale bread and toast it in some olive oil until it looks like this at which point we'll just transfer that into a bowl to cool and what we'll do is we'll crumble that over our pasta when it's done okay so our breadcrumbs are set and we can move on to the sardines and good news my version uses canned sardines not fresh which are traditional so I'm gonna use two cans make sure you get the ones packed in olive oil not only is this sardine going to be more delicious the oil it's packed in is going to be very flavorful and we're actually going to use that in the sauce and all we need to do to get this ready is kind of break it up on a plate and while you're breaking it up one optional step if you want you can pull out the backbones and just so you know this is an aesthetic thing those bones are actually very soft and completely edible but some people and by some I mean most kind of freak out when they see small vertebrae in their pasta so you're breaking this up you can pull those out if you want and then once that's done I want you to go ahead and add any olive oil that came packed with the sardines just add that right to the plate you should have a good couple tablespoons that came with it and then we'll simply set that aside until needed which isn't going to be very long so our fish is set and it's on to the second most important ingredient the fennel and there's basically two parts we're going to use we have that white bulb at the bottom but we're also going to pick off and chop up some of these wispy green leaves which some people refer to as fronds and what we want to do is pick off some of those green leaves and chop those up we want a couple tablespoons of those to put in at the end of the pasta and as far as the white part goes we're going to cut that in half and basically dice it like an onion so I'm going to down like this and then just slice it across into kind of small pieces if you want at the end you give a little extra chop as with most pasta sauces precision cutting not really imperative here so we'll dice up our fennel like I said will save some of those fennel leaves and at that point we can actually start cooking this pasta so what we're going to do is we're going to place a nice large skillet on medium heat and we're going to pour in a whole bunch of Sicilian olive oil and into that we're going to throw one diced onion and the fennel we just chopped up along with a nice big pinch of salt and what we're going to do is we're going to saute that onion of fennel on medium heat until it's soft so take your time with this back the heat down a little bit if you need to we don't want to Brown these vegetables we don't want a lot of color on these we just wanted to kind of sweat soften and sweetened so that's probably going to take you a good 10 minutes at least so we'll let that cook for a while and while we're waiting let's go ahead and prep our Safran wine mixture so I'm going to put a pinch of saffron threads in a mortar all right we don't want too much just a pinch and make sure you're buying the real stuff do not buy your saffron from a guy in the park and we'll do is we'll grind that for a couple seconds and then once pulverized we will add some white wine and we'll give that a mix and that is now ready to pour into our pan at the proper time so we'll go ahead and get that ready while our veggies are cooking which by this point should be close so let's go ahead and check these out see if they're ready and it's very easy to tell just push down with your spatula and if those pieces of fennel and onion are nice and soft you're ready to proceed at this point we can add three very important ingredients we're gonna throw in one anchovy fillet some minced garlic and some chopped up golden raisins so you might have seen the first two ingredients come in but the golden raisins are very important here we really need that a little bit of sweetness to balance out these other flavors so I don't care if you like raisins or not you're going to add them so we'll stir that in we're still on medium heat here and we're just going to cook that for about a minute or two we just want to sizzle that garlic a little bit and as you'll see that anchovy will kind of dissolve into the mixture so cook that stirring for about a minute at which point we will add our Saffir and infused wine just pour it in we'll give it a stir and this is really the only dangerous part of the recipe because what we want to do is cook this on medium for about two minutes until that wine is just about gone so don't walk away because if you're not paying attention this can burn so stand there stirring about two minutes later it should look something like this alright so that looks good next up we're going to take a ladle full of our boiling pasta water which by the way you set up ahead of time make sure your pasta water is ready to roll when you start this recipe so I want you to add a ladle of that in maybe a cup or so as you'll see later it's going to be up to you to adjust the liquid level so we'll put in some pasta water and then right before we actually cook our pasta we're going to add two more ingredients some red pepper flakes and some toasted pine nuts oh man those are good in here so we'll stir that in and at that point I will do is let that simmer gently next to our pot of boiling salted water while we cook our pasta and speaking of pasta we're actually going to use bucatini which is a thick hollow spaghetti so I'm gonna go ahead and toss in a half a pound of bucatini and of course because we're going to finish the pasta with the sauce we want to undercook this by at least a minute okay all right kind of a key point all right so our pasta is cooking our sauce has been prepped and it's on to the final steps so right before your timer rings for the pasta we will add our sardines to the pan along with like I said any olive oil that came in the can and of course accumulated juices and we'll distribute that throughout our mixture and then as soon as the timer rings from the pasta I'm going to add it into my pan and now I'm not draining it bucatini or thick spaghetti easy to grab with the tongs like this that way we still have our pot of pasta water next to this pan to add as needed so fish out your bucatini and add it to your sauce and at that point you're going to crank the heat to medium-high and finish this off by tossing that in the hot sauce and as you're doing this you want to make sure this mixture is very wet and juicy okay you see me adding some pasta water in here and I only showed that once but I did that like three or four times because like I said you really want a lot of moisture that's how it has to look in the pan otherwise it's going to be way too dry when it hits the bowl okay so we're gonna keep tossing and cooking that over medium-high in that hot sauce for a couple minutes and once you think your pasta has been cooked through and is absorbed all those beautiful flavors turn off the heat you're basically done and I said basically because we got to do two things we're going to add our reserved fennel leaves we chopped earlier and of course this would be the perfect time to taste for seasoning and once that's mixed in and it's tasting exactly like we want it we will serve that up into some hot bowls maybe we'll garnish with a few extra toasted pine nuts and a nice handful of the bread crumbs we fried up earlier assuming you have not eaten them all which is a possibility and then last but not least a little extra fresh fennel and that pasta con les our day is done and I'm telling you what if you never had this before you are in for a huge treat okay that sweet aromatic fennel is just perfect with the sardine you can see the beautiful color gave it we have a little bit of that hint of saffron in the background a little bit of heat from the chili a little bit of sweet from the raisin and above and beyond taste of course we got that textural interest from those crunchy bread crumbs and the pine nuts it's just a beautiful looking and tasting bowl of food of course if you can get fresh sardine fillets use them a lot so you won't be able to which is not a problem this is absolutely delicious with the canned sardine which is pretty inexpensive so there's no excuse not to have a few cans in the pantry for occasions such as this all right so I really do hope you give that a try head over to food wishes calm for all the ingredient amounts and more info as usual and as always enjoy

Channel: Food Wishes

Views: 641,923

Rating: 4.9109545 out of 5

Keywords: Pasta Con Le Sarde, Sicilian Cuisine (Cuisine), Pasta (Food), Sardine (Organism Classification), Fennel (Food), Style, Cooking, Kitchen, Recipe, chef, john, foodwishes, Spaghetti (Food), noodles, dinner, entree, seafood, Italian, Italian Food (Industry), Restaurant

Id: hr3M3BxbsTU

Length: 7min 47sec (467 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 12 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/ss0889]

it looks fucking delicious at the very end, but he added 3 things that i avoid like the plague and made them all completely vital to the dish.

all i can say is, chef john knows exactly what he is doing/talking about and if you like the ingredients he is using, by all means, this is the recipe to base all other recipes off of.

but on a personal level, jesus christ thats vile.

[u/dripitydrip]

pasta water?