Italian Regional Recipes

Spaghetti aglio, olio e peperoncino is one of Italian cooking’s simplest and yet most satisfying recipes. It’s regional origins are lost in time, with various regions claiming it as their own – from Abruzzo through to Lazio or Tuscanny. 

We’ve included this in the Sicilian section, because of a memorable variation we tasted in Palermo one time known locally  as Pasta cu l’àgghiu e l’uògghiu).

Boil a saucepan of water for your pasta – roughly 100grms of Spaghetti per person. When the water is boiling, add salt and the pasta. Spaghetti cooks roughly for 10-11 mins.

While the pasta is cooking, cut up four or five cloves of Garlic into large chunks (don’t dice it), and simmer in hot olive oil. Cut up two chillies in similar fashion, and add to the simmering oil. Let these cook enough to release their flavour into the oil, but make sure not to burn them!.

When the Pasta is ready, drain it and get ready to toss it into the oil mixture – but before you do, for the Palermitano variant, chop up some fresh parsley and add to the oil. Mix the spaghetti well in the oil, making sure it’s well covered, and there you go – it’s ready for serving.

The principle is simple, but obviously you can change the amount of garlic or chili that you want to add to the mix.  The dish is also tasty without Chili, if you’re that way inclined. The important thing is to make sure you use a good quality olive oil.

Serving Suggestion:

You can, of course add grated parmesan, but we recommend using instead a nice Pecorino Siciliano. As this is very much an everyday dish, there are no particular wine recommendations – we’ve had everything from the ubiquitous Pinot Griggio through to beer recomended. If you want, though, to keep to the Sicilian theme, why not try an Inzolia.

Tags: chilli, garlic, olive oil, palermo, parsley, pasta, pecorino siciliano, quick recipes

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 10th, 2008 at 8:26 am and is filed under national, pasta, Sicily, Vegetarian. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.