Pasta with Beef

Preparing the ingredients

Pasta with beef will be wonderful if you use young beef or veal without fat and film. For 2 servings you need a small piece of thinly cut meat, trimmed of anything extra. If the piece is thick, you can pound it a little so it is easier to cut into strips before frying, like chicken for bean and chicken salad.

Pasta with meat turns out best with penne or fusilli. Still, farfalle, which looks like little bows, will work too, as will variants of fusilli: the more tightly twisted fusilli spirale, or fusilli tricolore, colored with natural dyes. We love making this colorful pasta with fish. Or the fairly rare rotini, short spirals or springs, a little shorter than fusilli and more tightly twisted.

1. Prepare the vegetables and herbs. The vegetables should be fresh: to boil the beef and make a rich broth you need one medium carrot, a small onion and a few unpeeled garlic cloves. The tomatoes should be as ripe as possible. If tomatoes are a problem, you can use 2-3 tbsp of canned tomato pulp sold in jars. Soak a few sprigs of dill and parsley in cold water beforehand. Recipes usually call for basil, but this herb is too aromatic for pasta with beef.

   

Broth

2. Boil the beef with the vegetables. Pour 2–2.5 l of cold water into a large pot, add the beef in one piece and set it over medium heat. Do not drop the meat into boiling water: the outer layer instantly forms a crust and all the juices stay in the meat, so the broth turns out “empty”. The beef should heat up together with the water.

   Skim off the foam that forms, salt the broth with a pinch of salt, and add 1-2 bay leaves, 1-2 allspice berries and 5-7 black (mixed) peppercorns. Peel the onion and carrot. Cut a cross into the onion and cut the carrot into several large pieces. Add the vegetables and a few unpeeled garlic cloves. Simmer the broth gently, covered, for about 1 hour, until the meat is tender.

   

3. Sort out the broth. Take the boiled meat out of the broth and cut it into strips that match the pasta you chose. Also take out the carrot the beef was boiled with and cut it into large cubes or slices. Take out the garlic cloves: they go into the sauce and onto the plate as decoration. The onion can be thrown away. Strain the broth through a sieve to remove the peppercorns and bay leaf, and immediately set aside half a cup for the sauce.

Pasta and sauce

4. Cook the pasta in the broth. Bring the broth to a boil over high heat, add more salt at 7 g per 1 l of water (14–18 g in total, including the pinch), and cook the pasta in it until al dente. The cooking time on the package usually guarantees the right doneness, but in broth it may be a bit longer, literally 2-3 mins. Taste the pasta to check. Drain the cooked pasta in a colander.

5. Fry the beef. Heat 2-3 tbsp of olive oil in a skillet and let it warm up for a bit so the smell typical of natural oil disappears. Reduce the heat to medium and fry the sliced boiled beef in the oil until lightly browned. Stir the meat fairly often for better browning. Ideally you get a slightly crispy, thin, golden crust.

   

6. Add the vegetables from the broth. Add the sliced boiled carrot and the garlic cloves to the meat. Fry the meat and vegetables for 2-3 mins.

   

7. Simmer the sauce with tomatoes. Scald the tomatoes with boiling water, peel them and remove the seeds. Chop the flesh with a knife and add it to the beef. Instead of fresh tomatoes you can add canned tomato pulp, which is sold in stores and widely used in Italian cooking. Salt the sauce and season with ground black pepper to taste. Add 2-3 tbsp of the set-aside broth. Pasta with beef should not be “dry”, and the sauce can be fairly thin. Simmer the beef and vegetables, covered, over low heat for 8-10 mins. If needed, add more broth.

   

Serving

8. Mix the pasta with the sauce and herbs. Pick the leaves off the dill and parsley sprigs and chop them very finely with a knife. Mix the pasta cooked in the broth with the beef and sauce, add the chopped herbs, stir and divide among plates.

   

9. Serve immediately, while the pasta is hot. Sprinkle the dish with a little grated Parmesan or a similar cheese: pecorino, Grana Padano and so on. Garnish with sprigs of herbs and the fried garlic cloves.

   

   Tasty pasta with beef, vegetables and tomatoes makes a filling, delicious breakfast. You can cook the broth the day before, and in the morning just reheat it and cook the pasta in it. All the other ingredients are ready for frying, so in this case pasta with beef takes less than 30 mins.