Spaghetti with Sausages in Tomato Sauce

Which pasta and sausages to choose

For spaghetti with sausages you can use not only regular spaghetti but other long pasta too. Capellini are a good choice – they are very thin and cook quickly, and the dish turns out exceptionally tender. Thicker pasta or bucatini work well, and so do noodle-like shapes – fettuccine, tagliatelle, pappardelle and so on. What matters is that the long pasta is good quality and not a blend with soft flour, or you will end up with a mush of overcooked dough.

For this dish you need pork or chicken sausages; ones made from a mix of meats will do as well. Of course, use real meat sausages, not soy ones. Ideally the sausages are small, so you don’t have to crumble or slice them. I bought small, very tasty pork sausages in a so-called “natural” casing.

Whether to peel the sausages is up to you. There are doubts about how “natural” the casing is, but the package said it was edible. In fact, the vast majority of casings are not digested by the body at all and pass through without consequences. If you want to peel the sausages, peel them and put your mind at ease.

Sausages with sauce

1. Flavor the oil with garlic. Pour 3-4 tbsp of olive oil into a frying pan. Heat it over medium heat and fry one or two peeled garlic cloves, flattened with the side of a knife blade, in the oil. When the garlic starts to darken, throw it away. The garlic lightly flavors the olive oil.

   

2. Fry the sausages for 1 min: put the sausages, peeled or in their casings, into the olive oil. If you use sausages in casings, first cut off the ends where there is a stretch of casing without filling between individual sausages. By the way, if for some reason you use large sausages or sardelki that have been peeled, you can fry them longer, but try not to brown them.

   

3. Turn the heat down under the pan and carefully pour 1 cup of natural tomato juice (200 ml) over the sausages. If you can use tomato pulp, that is only welcome. But ordinary homemade tomato juice put up in summer will do just fine. Pasta with sausages in a tasty tomato sauce can even be made from fresh tomatoes, if it’s the season.

   

4. Season the sauce. Salt and pepper the sausages in tomato. Add 0.5 tsp of sugar (2 g) to make the sauce sweet and sour, similar to salsa di pomodoro. Add dried oregano or a couple of pinches of a dried mix of aromatic herbs typical of the Mediterranean region – savory, basil, oregano, thyme and so on. Such mixes, and good ones, are on sale now.

   

5. Simmer the sauce until thick. Bring the sauce with sausages to a boil, reduce the heat and cover with a lid. Simmer the sauce for 10 mins, then remove the lid and, raising the heat slightly, cook the sauce down to the consistency of kefir. The sauce must be thick enough to cling to the pasta, otherwise the spaghetti will turn into tomato soup.

   

Pasta

6. Boil the pasta and drain it in a colander. In a large pot, bring 2 l of water to a boil, salt it at 7 g of salt per liter (14 g) and cook the pasta of your choice. Depending on the type of pasta, the cooking time can vary a lot. For example, spaghetti cooks in 8-10 mins, capellini in 3-4 mins. Wide pappardelle can take even longer. In any case, the cooking time is printed on the package, and the manufacturer guarantees that in that time the pasta will be al dente. Drain the cooked pasta in a colander to let the water run off.

Serving

7. Divide the pasta among plates – preferably small and fairly deep ones. Put the sausages on top of the spaghetti and spoon the sauce over.

   

8. Garnish and serve hot. Pick the leaves off the parsley sprigs and, without chopping them, scatter them on the plate. Add a few small cherry tomatoes cut in half.

   

   If you like, and by the way it’s delicious, sprinkle with a little coarsely ground dried hot chili pod, or with black pepper. Spaghetti with sausages in tomato sauce is a spicy dish, but not a hot one. Serve the spaghetti hot – that’s when the dish tastes best.