Pasta with Sausage

Sauce

1. Homemade sausage pasta is easy to make: the sausage sauce cooks in about half an hour from readily available ingredients. Buy pork or chicken sausage, but a very soft one, so that you can easily pinch it into pieces with your fingers. Many Italian varieties, and our local ones too, are perfect for this. The sauce should have plenty of vegetables: onion or shallot, bell pepper and tomato pulp, canned or made from fresh tomatoes.

2. Prepare the vegetables: peel the onion, bell pepper, hot pepper and garlic. Cut the peppers and onion into cubes.

   

3. Put a pot with 2 l of water on the heat: the sauce cooks quickly, so the pasta should be boiled in parallel.

4. Fry the vegetables. Heat the olive oil in a frying pan over medium heat and fry the garlic cloves, crushed with the flat of a knife, then discard the garlic. In the same oil, fry the pepper and onion until soft and starting to brown.

   

5. Add the sausage. Peel the sausage and pinch it with your fingers into small shreds. By the way, smoked sausages or sardelki work perfectly well in this dish. If the sausage is not very soft, you will have to cut it into cubes, and it will stand out in the finished sauce. Add the sausage meat to the vegetables and fry for 2-3 mins. Then add 0.5 tsp of sugar (2 g) and a little dried oregano, and salt lightly: the sausage is salty itself.

   

6. Add the tomato purée to the pan. If you use fresh tomatoes, scald them with boiling water, peel them and chop the pulp very finely with a knife. It is very convenient to use canned tomato pulp: just crush the peeled canned tomatoes in your hand to get a slightly coarse tomato purée. Often the jars already contain chopped pulp.

   

7. Simmer the sauce. Stir well and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat so the sauce barely bubbles, cover the pan with a lid and cook for 15 mins. Do not add any liquid: the sauce should be thick, not runny. Add more salt and spices to taste. To make the sausage pasta more piquant, boost the heat with dried chili flakes.

   

Pasta

1. Use a short tubular pasta: penne, tortiglioni or rigatoni.

2. While the sauce cooks, boil the pasta: add 10 g of salt to the boiling water (5 g per 1 l of water, as the sausage sauce is salty), add the pasta and cook until al dente, following the time on the package. Drain the pasta in a colander.

3. Combine the sausage sauce and the boiled pasta in the pan and mix well. Tubular pasta fills with sauce and holds it well. It may seem that there is little sauce, because the surface of the pasta is coated with only a thin layer, but all the rest of the sauce is inside the pasta.

   

Serving

1. Divide the pasta among plates and, if you like, sprinkle with a pinch of finely chopped parsley. Serve the pasta with sausage sauce hot and right away; do not reheat it. This dish has a very rich tomato and meat flavor and is perfect for a quick breakfast.

   

   You can add carrot or juicy green celery stalks to the ingredients. Celery is a great substitute when sweet peppers are out of season. Thyme and rosemary are often added too, which noticeably deepens the flavor of the sauce. The finished sauce can be served not only with pasta but also as an accompaniment to fried meat. I read somewhere that it is often served with some types of polenta.