Ben tornati broccoli!

Everybody in Italy is yelling at me, “Those aren’t orecchiette!” And they’re right, they aren’t. They are the same boiling water and flour pasta, but shaped a different way. They might be considered cauliflower ears (orecchiette is little ears) except the traditional recipe is not made with cauliflower, but with broccoli.

This, unlike almost all the recipes here, is not my recipe. You would not like the recipe I came up with for this pasta dish when I tried to recreate it on my own. It was never good, no matter how good the broccoli or how authentic the pasta, so in desperation I went to the website for Bari, Italy, where this dish comes from. The local radio station had posted an official recipe with an ingredient I would never have guessed if I’d tried for years. Without it this is just broccoli with some pasta. Meh. With it, it’s “Orecchiette con broccoletti”. The secret ingredient disappears completely, but creates the genuine flavor although it’s unidentifiable. The Baresi use what we in the US called broccoli rabe. I like it, but I love broccoli, so that’s what I make and it is grudgingly acceptable to the Baresi.

This is the first broccoli of the year. It is not the best broccoli of the year, because it hasn’t been cold yet and that’s what makes broccoli go from nice to slap-me-in-my-face wonderful. There’s a whole nutty thing that goes on in frostbitten broccoli. Still, not having seen a stalk of broccoli since May, I was pretty darned happy to see this nice big flower in the market Wednesday afternoon.

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Here’s what goes into this pasta for two people:

200 grams of orecchiette or another similar pasta

8 ounces of fresh broccoli; stems, leaves and all, cut into smallish pieces
2 tablespoons of good olive oil
2 fat cloves of garlic, sliced
2 hot chilies, broken up with fingers – mine were the standard little hot ones found here, you might want to use one if yours are hot or if you feel wimpy
2 anchovy fillets

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Put a big pot of water on to boil and then clean, cut and slice the various ingredients. Heat the oil in a large frying pan and put the broken chilies, the garlic slices and the anchovy fillets into it to gently fry. This happens to be one of only a few recipes in which you brown garlic, but you can’t burn it or it will all be ruined forever, like Scarlet O’Hara. So keep the heat low and just let the oil simmer.

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Once the water is boiling, throw a lump (an all-fingers pinch) of coarse salt into it and then the pasta. Check the package for cooking time, because you need to know the estimated finish time. Stir it up and then let it boil. About three minutes before the cooking time elapses, add the broccoli into the pasta. Take a ladle full of the pasta water and spill it into the frying pan so the garlic won’t burn.

A minute before you expect the pasta to be done, start biting it to test it. You will want it to be a little less done than al dente. When it is, drain everything that is in the pot and put it into the frying pan, stirring it around and getting it well covered in the garlicky sauce. The pasta continues to cook during this, and this kind of pasta goes soft very fast, so it should go in a bit too firm. Once it’s mixed and wonderful, drizzle a little raw oil over it and serve it up. Delicious.

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Even if you think you don’t like anchovies, do try this, because you can’t tell they’re in there. Promise. I buy them in little jars that I keep in the fridge, as you can see from the fogged up glass in the picture. Do not put cheese on this, because it ruins it. Baresi propose that you brown breadcrumbs in oil to sprinkle over it, but I never bother. And now, we will send this off to Presto Pasta Night.