RECIPE: Breadcrumb Pasta à la Giada

Easy enough to counter the gravitational pull of a sofa.

It’s 9:45 PM. You’ve been sitting on the sofa doing who knows what, and you’re hungry but not willing to reach for Postmates again.  We know this situation.  I live it multiple times a week.  For as much as I spill ink about recipes and cooking, the truth is that I am incredibly lazy.  It’s a laziness that spans hours — usually starting in the afternoon moments after I pledge to go to the grocery store to shop for dinner.

“I’ll just peruse some of these underused cookbooks,” I will tell myself as I settle into the sofa, arranging a small stack of volumes next to my hip.  I’ll leaf through the pages, jot down a list of potential recipes, and then assemble the ingredients on my phone proudly as if I’ve actually pulled out a four course meal from my oven already.

It all sounds very industrious and self-motivated, but the process devolves quickly.  If I’m lucky, I actually take myself to the store right away.  But chances are I’ve already been distracted away from the task at hand. Maybe it’s an email, maybe it’s a voice in my head guilting me into hitting the Peloton first.  Whatever the distraction may be, I wind up doing something else entirely and then somehow it’s now 8:30 PM.

Again, if I’m lucky, I have a second burst of motivation and take myself to the store.  Sounds like I’m back on track, right?  Not really.  The store is its own amusement park of joys and side quests.  Now I’m thinking about all the food I need for not just tonight, but the whole week.  A ten-minute jaunt turns into an epic saga of idling down every aisle, rolling my eyes at people with poor spatial awareness.  An hour later, I return home, place the bags on the counter and… flop down on the sofa.  That was hard work! I need a breather!  And so the couch draws me back into its clutches.

Of course, there are many times when I never even make it to the store.  I just remain on the sofa playing word games on my phone, reading news about board games, or making memes for Twitter that ultimately only about five people will enjoy.  In either scenario – whether I went to the store or not — I wind up starving and exhausted on a couch, and while the path out of that state seems to be to stand up and cook, I instead employ a different strategy:  languishing.  It solves nothing, and yet it’s so fun to do!  Truly, it’s my specialty. I’m an A+ languisher.

Eventually a guilt-instinct kicks in:  what about your groceries?  What about those recipes you were excited about? Do you dare turn your back on these things and waste more money on delivery?  No.  No, I will not.

So now I’ve backed myself into a cooking corner: it’s too late in the evening to start anything ambitious from a cookbook, but I’m unwilling to order food.  Time for something fast and reliable.  And that’s when I turn to the very first pasta I learned how to make:  Giada De Laurentiis’s orecchiette with toasted breadcrumbs.

Flashback to 2005.  I was unemployed, and my grocery regimen involved going to Costco every two weeks with my roomie and loading up on French bread pizzas, hot dogs, hot pockets, Kraft Mac and Cheese, and who knows what else.  I won’t lie:  it was a wonderful time in my life.  But those items were wreaking havoc on my wallet, let alone my body.  I came to the realization that I needed to learn how to cook.  Like, truly cook.  And whatever I cooked had to be cheap and long-lasting.  In other words, pasta.

I started where any clueless person might begin:  by flipping on the Food Network [insert joke about how 2005 was the last time the Food Network actually showed cooking].  On screen was a curly haired lady with a wide smile that seemed to mask some degree of inner rage.  This, of course, was Giada De Laurentiis, and I was watching her seminal program Everyday Italian.  Fortunately, that episode was titled “Quick pasta classics,” perfect for a newb like me.

I followed along as Giada made an unimaginably simple dish: breadcrumbs “toasted” in olive oil and then tossed with pasta and topped with parmesan and prosciutto.  The description is basically the recipe.  That night I made the dish… and it was really good! Hey, I could make pasta.

For the next few years, I made the dish all the time.  It really was so simple.  There was nothing to mess up.  I soon purchased a random pasta cookbook from Barnes & Noble, which had me advancing my techniques with not-so-authentic recipes.  I was also playing around with other dishes, exploring the wide world of The Barefoot Contessa, and becoming gradually more experienced as a baby home cook.

The frequency with which I made Giada’s orecchiette fell off a bit, but it never left my repertoire.  In fact, I had become confident enough in the kitchen to start experimenting with it.  The prosciutto, while delicious, was expensive and annoying to slice up. Plus, it could get lost in the mix.  I began experimenting with different proteins, one day tossing pepperoni of all things into the dish.  Game changer.  Never went back.  The result: a light, flavorful pasta with punches of umami from the parmesan and sausage.

I’ve played around with garlic, fennel, lemon zest – all to great effect.  But despite all the adjustments, the pasta remains profoundly simple – coming together in as long as it takes to boil water and cook noodles. That’s why this orecchiette recipe continues to be my go-to last minute / late night / stuck on the couch / pantry-raiding pasta.  It’s also why I’m always sure to keep a supply of Italian breadcrumbs and pepperoni on hand (or, failing pepperoni, some sort of sharp, cured meat like Genoa salami).  I never know when I’ll fall victim to languishing, but I no longer have to feel guilty with this recipe in my quiver.

Here’s my version of Giada’s orecchiette, which recently saved me after a lazy day of bingeing Love Island UK.

Orecchiette with Toasted Breadcrumbs and Pepperoni

Ingredients:

1 lb dried orecchiette (or something small like farfalle, shells, or even wagon wheels)

3 oz pepperoni (or any cured meat you might find in the deli case: genoa salami, for example. Or just go classic with prosciutto)

1-2 cloves of garlic

¾ cup extra virgin olive oil (don’t skimp, this is your sauce)

½ tsp fennel seed

Pinch red pepper flakes

2/3 cup Italian seasoned bread crumbs (not PLAIN)

Salt and pepper

½-1 cup grated parmesan (or similar cheese like pecorino romano or grana padana)

2 tbs chopped parsley leaves

Zest of one lemon, optional

Ingredients note:  in the spirit of easiness and pantry casualness, please note that there’s a lot of flexibility with these ingredients.  Use more meat if you want to finish out some package in your fridge.  Mix meats.  Don’t have fennel seed or parsley?  You can skip it.   I’d argue that the only essential ingredients here are oil, seasoned breadcrumbs, parmesan, and some sort of meat.  Oh, and pasta, of course.  But honestly, vegetarians can probably skip the meat entirely and still have a perfectly lovely dish.

The Steps:

1.     Make the pasta:  Bring a large pot of water to a boil.  About six quarts?  When it comes to a rolling boil, add in two large handfuls of kosher salt.  It’s like they say: you want it to taste like the sea.  Add in your pasta and cook as instructed on the packaging for al-dente.

2.     MEANWHILE… As the water comes to a boil, do some light prep:  mince your garlic and dice your pepperoni.  You want the pepperoni pieces small enough to distribute widely throughout the pasta but big enough that you get flavor bombs with every bite. About the size of the ESC key on a keyboard.

a.     I like to stack the pepperoni rounds all up in a column and slice them into two semi circles, and then halve those into quarters and then eighths. The whole cutting-through-a-tower-of-pepperoni thing is very satisfying.  Or you can just dice like a normal person.

3.     Place a wide 12” skillet or a Dutch oven over medium heat and add the olive oil.  Once it’s shimmering, add the pepperoni, and fennel seed.  Sizzle away for about 2-3 minutes.  The idea here is to brown the meat a little and render some of its oils into the pan.  We are not crisping the meat, so if it looks like things are going in that direction, lower the heat or just move onto the next step.

a.     I like using a Dutch oven because it makes mixing in the pasta much easier later on.

b.     I used to only add half a cup of olive oil in an effort to be “healthier.” Don’t do this.  Use all the olive oil or else your pasta will feel sort of dry.

c.     If you’re feeling really bold, before you add the pepperoni, you can drop a few anchovies into the oil and stir until they dissolve away.

d.     If you’re using prosciutto, don’t add it now.

4.     Add the garlic and sauté for about a minute or two, until fragrant. Add the red pepper flakes and saute for about 30 seconds.

5.     Add the bread crumbs and a pinch of salt and stir with a spoon. Lower the temp to medium-low and then stir constantly until the bread crumbs darken from a pale blonde to a brownish-orange.  This could happen quickly or it could take five minutes. Depends on a lot of factors.  All you need to worry about is stirring so that the crumbs don’t burn.  Grind some twists of black pepper into the mixture because why not.

6.     Once the mixture has the brown hues of wet sand, remove the skillet from the heat.

7.     Chances are the pasta is still not ready.  If you haven’t grated your parm, now would be the time to do it.  If you plan to use parsley as a garnish, chop it now.

8.     Once the pasta is ready, reserve half a cup of the pasta liquid in a coffee cup.  Drain the pasta in a colander and then immediately dump the pasta into the breadcrumbs. Mix everything around with two big spoons.  Add the parmesan and optional lemon zest, toss some more.  Taste for seasoning.  Don’t be afraid to add more salt — it probably needs it.  Get it to the point where you can’t stop going in for bonus tastes.

a.     Check for texture:  if it feels too dry, add a little reserved pasta water and mix it around for about a minute. 

b.     If you’re using prosciutto, now is the time to add it.

c.     As you toss the pasta, you want all those breadcrumbs and meats to get all up in the nooks and crannies.  Scrape everything off the bottom of the pot.

9.     Garnish with parsley and more grated parm.  Enjoy!