The Story
If there’s one pasta dish that everyone knows to mention with a wink and a nod, it’s puttanesca. This is a dish born from necessity and hard times; so keep your pantry stocked with tins and jars of long-life ingredients, and then when fresh produce is hard to find, or you can’t quite summon the will to leave the house for it, smugly whip yourself up a plate of puttanesca.
I’m not going to lie, puttanesca was first introduced to me as a flavour of tinned tuna. And yes, I may be guilty of stirring the odd one of those tins through a plate of pasta and calling it dinner. But hey, that’s just embracing the intent of the dish. This week we’ve served our puttanesca with a simple cracked pepper fettuccine.
The Pasta
This week’s fettuccine uses the old familiar 100g of flour to 1 egg recipe. You might remember variations of it from our farfalle, fagottini, tortelli, sacchettoni, or pretty much any general pasta dough recipe. This week we used 20% semolina, with the rest made up of 00 flour.
Just add a pinch of salt, and keep cracking that pepper in to taste. If you stir the dry ingredients around as you add the pepper, you’ll get a pretty good feel for the eventual distribution through the dough. It should be similar to those delicious cracked pepper water cracker things.
Mix everything together in a well until it forms a ball, knead it for 10 minutes, then let it rest for another 30. We rolled ours through to a medium thickness of 6 on the pasta machine, before cutting it.
Transfer to baking paper lined trays, and refrigerate covered for up to a week (for that chewy bite).
The Sauce
In keeping with the spirit of the dish (pantry items, not occupational) we rounded up the best half-finished jars of stuff in the fridge, and grabbed a tin of tomatoes.
Just fry up those anchovies, garlic cloves, capers, and chilli, then toss in your tinned tomatoes and olives. Cook it until you’re happy with the flavour and thickness, this shouldn’t take more than 15 minutes, then add your freshly made and cooked al dente fettuccine directly into the pan.
This is a guilty pleasure kind of dish for us, because it doesn’t use any fresh ingredients, and the total cooking time is less time than it takes to even rest the pasta dough. But it’s like that by nature, and more delicious for it!
Enjoy your pasta. Buon appetito.
– Al & Al.
Equipment
- Air tight container for resting
- Pasta roller and cutter (if not using a rolling pin and knife)
- Frypan
Ingredients
Pasta
- 160 g 00 flour
- 40 g semolina
- 2 eggs
- 1 tbsp cracked pepper adjust to taste
- pinch salt
Sauce
- 4 tbsps olive oil extra virgin (we use Rio Vista Olives’ Nothin’ But Robust)
- 4 anchovy fillets
- 8 cloves garlic peeled, lightly smashed
- 2 tbsp capers
- 1/2 tbsp dried red chilli flakes
- 400 g tinned chopped tomatoes
- pinch sugar
- 1/2 cup black olives sliced
- salt and pepper to taste
- 2 tbsp whole miniature pickled capsicums substitute with larger capsicums, chopped, to serve
Instructions
Pasta
- Mix flours, pepper, and salt together, forming into a well. Add eggs into the centre, and combine with a fork until dough holds together in a rough ball.
- Knead the dough vigorously for 10 minutes, before sealing in an airtight container. Rest it for 30 minutes away from heat and direct sunlight.
- Cut the dough into four pieces, and then roll one at a time through the widest setting on the pasta machine a few times, folding the dough over itself in between passes. Keep the dough not being worked on in the airtight container.
- Gradually step through the thicknesses to a medium-thin setting of 6, and then cut into sheets of approximately 30cm in length.
- Feed sheets through the fettuccine attachment, toss the cut pasta lightly in flour to coat, and then transfer to a baking paper lined tray. Refrigerate uncovered for up to one week.
Sauce
- For the sauce, lightly fry the anchovy fillets, garlic, and capers in the oil for 3-4 minutes on low-medium heat, or until the anchovies have broken down, the garlic is beginning to brown, and the capers are slightly crispy. Add the chilli flakes and cook for a further 30 seconds or until aromatic.
- Add the tomatoes, black olives, and a pinch of sugar. Raise the heat to medium and cook for 10-15 minutes until the sauce thickens and the tomatoes lose their raw taste. Season with salt and pepper to taste.
- Cook the pasta in lightly salted boiling water for 2-3 minutes until al dente (no raw white dough visible when pasta is cut into), and then drain, retaining 1/2 cup of cooking water.
- Toss the pasta into the sauce, in the frypan, adding pasta water if required for emulsification.
- Serve with miniature capsicums, and a fresh crack of pepper.
