I was introduced to the pasta by Rita in Souther Tuscany. She has a company called “peperita” specializing in chili peppers.
This was a pasta which was created by the Italians in Libia, during the 30’s and 40’s.
Red, white and green!
The magic is in how it’s cooked! Like a risotto, adding the water a little at a time, which creates a wonderful almost creamy sauce. The starch from the pasta thickens the sauce and it clings to the pasta.
Foreign kitchen this is Judy of doing the Cucina today I’m going to start a little series about some pastas with sauces that are really fun that I’ve learned in all my years hanging out here and this is a really fun pasta sauce and the style of cooking your pasta is a little bit
Different which I think is fun I think all of us live basically on the agio pepperoncino recipe which is usually you boil your spaghetti and a new saute garlic olive oil and chili pepper and just toss it together something we eat like at midnight when you’re hanging out
With your friends and you’re just hungry it’s the base of a lot of different recipes but what I learned working with my girlfriend who produces Chili Peppers she does the version she calls tripolina so it’s garlic olive oil and instead of chili pepper she uses chili puree or
Chili paste okay if you have fresh chilies in summer you can do that and what I’m going to do is start it in a flat pan so I’m going to cover the bottom of my pan in olive oil okay because essentially when you’re doing your pepperoncino the olive oil becomes your sauce
And then I’m going to do slices of garlic now if you use a garlic press it tends to smash the garlic too small and it tends to burn faster so one of the other tricks I Learned was to put Garlic into cold oil and if you put it in slices
It won’t burn as fast so just take a sharp knife and do nice thin slices of garlic I actually like my garlic to get kind of crispy but it’s up to you this one is usually just like white and I do a garlic Clover person okay so I’m going to do two
In the meantime I have pasta water boiling but I’m not going to cook my pasta in that water I’m going to cook my pasta risotto Style okay so usually when you’re doing your pasta with spaghetti it’s usually a smaller spaghetti here pepperoncino no one here really kind of does an angel
Hair pasta that’s more of a a soup kind of pasta or something not really for a nice big sauce or anything if you like angel hair or spaghetti I get alligatara um go for it I think this as a base is really nice with seafood and my girlfriend just did garlic olive
Oil chili pepper and chopped parsley and what I’m going to do today is my take on it because this was called pasta and this is something she says came from Libya during a war when the Italians were imprisoned there okay that they wanted their memories of their country and they used the chili
Peppers which were there and just garlic and very simple probably in Libya they didn’t have the same pots or anything too so they did this in a flat pot just adding your water and you always want to Salt your pasta water today I’m going to use basil instead of
Parsley and what I like to do also is ADD um I like tomatoes fresh tomatoes just sauteed at the end but we’re going to use which are a nice flat dry pasta and these dry pastas this is a tiger Kelly they cook very quickly which are perfect
When you’re doing a risotto style pasta so traditionally what you’re going to need are like two of these per person of these dried like Tanya Tammy my garlic is just getting a little bit golden so I’m going to put on a slower heat now and once your garlic has gotten golden
You can add your chilies that are like packed in oil is usually what you find them that’s also got that nice hot oil but like I said if you have any fresh chilies like a cayenne pepper is what she uses you can just add that like a nice spicy sauce
So now we’re going to start to do our risotto we have our our boiling water so I’m just going to add a label of this okay to give me now this chili infused broth and I’m going to layer in my pasta and start to add some of the water okay
And as we’re cooking this then will cook the pasta we’re going to add some of our cherry tomatoes I’m going to cut them just into quarters they really only need to warm up and the pasta takes seven minutes to cook the water you also get a beautiful starch in there
Which is going to make the sauce a little creamier so it’s up to you about the tomatoes this is my addition but again I like that red white and green and this is kind of a take of what I used to do when I worked at Dario’s we
Would do this for lunch a lot I’ll go get a pepperoncino cherry tomatoes and basil and he would use his Lardo as instead of olive oil so everybody has their own little touch so now I’m going to add my fresh tomatoes on here bigger heat okay you just didn’t want that to um
To kind of fry your face a little bit and just give them a little flip you want them to absorb on both sides and it will take about seven minutes to cook it’s like a little miracle I think this is beautiful with prawns it’s nice just for a light spicy first course
Okay and then I’m going to put in some of my basil and you can just cut this into little oh it smells so good little thin strips these are just the Classic Italian flavors tomatoes and basil right olive oil garlic chili so that this pasta sauce is going to
Absorb this flavored garlic chili water into the noodle itself which makes this really really delicious so they say risotto because like risotto you start off by sauteing it a little and then slowly adding your liquids until so I’m not trying to force the pasta to fall apart or anything when it starts to
Get soft it will just naturally Fall Apart this kind of reminds me a little bit of the spaghetti in body where you kind of almost fry your flat spaghetti first in garlic olive oil and tomato paste and then you add a tomato broth while you’re cooking it so different regions have different
Names for pastas different ways of making them and if you want to do this more classically you could just have boiled your pasta first and then finished it off in your pan a little bit of sauce here but I thought this is just a little prettier
And another way of cooking just in case I think this works a lot when you’re camping and don’t have like big pots I have is a skillet or something I’m going to just keep adding like a half a ladle at a time and you’ll see now the tomatoes are breaking down
Pastas just starting to get soft okay so this probably now has five more minutes and I’m just flipping it to help it get soft on both sides let me just show you this now so you can see it’s nice and kind of brothy in here can you see that all that broth
We’ll see you in five minutes look at that creamy sauce and that’s from the starch and the pasta and now you can see the little nests have broken apart and we just slowly slowly add more water until then the pasta is cooked and like I said the package says about seven minutes
Now our pasta is cooked and you really just taste it to see if it’s Al Dente we have this beautiful creamy sauce that’s coating all the pasta and I’ll add all the sauce on top okay let me just clean off my platter here so here look at that beautiful creamy sauce cherry tomatoes
And just for fun I’m going to top it with fresh cherry tomatoes and basil okay make it a little more summery even and then lots of Parmesan cheese okay and here we have our delicious pasta a la tripolina from pepperita my friend in radema Bon Appetito