PENNE CON LA BOTTARGA

The concept of "favorite pasta" has a way of changing over the years or maybe even month to month as kids grow, seasons change, or we fall out of the habit of this or another kind of pasta or sauce. With us there was for a while a madness was about pesto, and I grew large amounts of basil—the right kind of basil (grande genovese) from seed imported from Liguria. Then there were the "tomato sauce years," when I grew San Marzanos in the yard and bought boxes of farmers market tomatoes to make basic sauces containing only tomatoes and salt. Those were ambitious times.

It's been over a year since the last time I rolled out fresh pasta or made gnocchi from scratch, but now that I'm posting to Frangykitchen, I might have to dust off some of those skills for fresh blog-able content. Right now, I'm thinking about how we (and maybe most other households) have a small set of "go to" dishes made from dried pasta that just work perfectly in different situations and carry all the advantages of noodles and sauce, which is to say, they can be prepared quickly and are delicious.

There's spaghetti, which for us usually means either aglio e olio or carbonara. Penne rigate is the other big favorite for us, and this usually means arrabbiata or pesto. For more "special" dinners we often tap into our stock of exotic ingredients, and here is where we come to the topic of bottarga.



Bottarga is fish roe, or ripe ovaries extracted whole from the body cavity of just-caught fish, salted and air dried and pressed through some mysterious process that is thought to originate either in Liguria or in Sardinia. Traditionally, two types of fish roe are used: tuna for "bottarga di tonno" and mullet for "bottarga di muggine." The nearly exclusive use of these two fish species to make such a toney item (yes, the price you see in the image really is 18.47 euro) has always struck me as completely bizarre. Tuna I understand—kings of the sea, they are the true nobility among fishkind. Mullet, however, are at the opposite end of the spectrum of piscatorial social rank. Italians often refer to muggine (mullet) by other colorful names such as "pescediesel" (diesel fish, because they smell like the bilge-y water in the port of Genoa) and "mangiacacca" (which I'm not going to translate for you). Please note that I'm restraining myself from mentioning the other kind of "mullet."

Anyways, up until around ten years ago, very few people outside certain provinces of Italy knew about bottarga, and in those areas its use was fairly limited to local "high-class" dishes—usually a very thin slice of bottarga on canapés, often paired with other exotic slices from the sea such as mosciame, which is basically a prosciutto made from the meat of tuna or—under the cloak of secrecy since this is totally illegal—dolphin.

I don't see a surge of popularity for eating Flipper anytime soon, but bottarga has definitely hit the big time. World-famous chef David Pasternack of Esca restaurant in New York has been making bottarga from the ovaries of different species of fish, and basically has found what seemed to me to be the intuitive truth—that with the exception of some fish whose eggs are poisonous (like the Great Barracuda), any fish can be used to make excellent bottarga, and this is the intuitive truth because we all know that fish eggs are just generally very tasty!

These days it's possible to find bottarga made in Italy from a variety of fish (I got a nice bonito bottarga last year), but what you'll find more than anything else is still mostly tuna and mullet. Of the two, tuna bottarga has a bold flavor and drier consistency, while mullet bottarga is mild and rather oily. My preference has always been tuna. You also have a choice between pre-grated in a jar and solid blocks of bottarga vacuum sealed and kept under refrigeration. The stuff in a jar is just not very good, in my opinion. The solid blocks can be kept in the fridge and grated with a microplane grater or slightly frozen and sliced with a mandoline (or truffle slicer), and the rest can go in a ziploc and then back into the fridge. Stuff with that much salt keeps for months.

So we're in the mood for something we won't find just anywhere, but we're also not in the mood to do anything elaborate. One very viable solution: pasta con la bottarga. Here's what I do.

Water for a pound of pasta is put on to boil. In a large sauté pan, I gently cook some finely minced garlic in a small amount of olive oil. Before the garlic is fully cooked in goes a glass of white wine—something like a sauvignon blanc will do—and this is allowed to reduce a bit. Around the time the penne go into the boiling water, I can add a nice dose of heavy cream to the wine and garlic, and let this reduce some more while the penne cook.



In the meantime, I grate out a nice pile of bottarga with a microplane grater, and I chop finely a medium handful of either chives or dill. If I've timed things right the pasta approaches perfect done-ness at the same time that the cream/wine has reduced by the right amount. This is the point where I call the spouse to the table.

Final step. The penne are strained and given a nice shake. The herbs go into the cream and given a stir with a dash of sea salt. Yes, even with the bottarga, additional salt is needed. Pasta added and mixed with the sauce and then put into a big "spaghettata"—a large shallow serving bowl for pasta. At last the fine flakes of bottarga are sprinkled over the pasta. Adri is arriving at the table right about now. And yes, this is enough for four as a primo piatto, but we polish it all off no prob just the two of us. We know to have some bread handy to wipe up the bottarga and herb-y cream after the pasta is gone.