Sunday Gravy with yeah right: Bucatini all’Amatriciana!

Good Sunday morning everyone!

Damn glad to see you all here.

Holy fucking hot damn we’ve got a game on Thursday night. Yeah it’s the Hall of Fame game and no, the actual starting units won’t play but it’s football! In uniforms that we recognize! That means we’re in full goddamn swing until February!

I can’t stop using exclamation points!!!

What is does mean is we are close to the real goddamn deal and holy shit am I ever ready.

The seed for the idea that eventually became this post and this menu was planted during some of our darkest days from very early in the pandemic. I spent many long hours by myself at work in a massive fucking building utterly alone. I spent as many hours as I could reading. Yes, I was absolutely “doom scrolling” like every fucking one of us but at the same time I was looking for anything to brighten my day.

I’ve always been a fan of the sports writer Wright Thompson. He’s from Oxford Mississippi – just like Faulkner and Larry Brown (the writer not the coach and holy shit do you need to read Larry Brown if you haven’t) – * and Wright is sports first but also has incredible worldviews and his prose is wonderful. He was the first writer I read who expounded on the virtues of Pappy Van Winkle and was very much the reason that I sought, and purchased a bottle of my own.

(*) did I just pull off the rarely attempted “parens inside the dash” double backwards grammatical summersault? You decide!

Anyway he wrote this piece that is a fantastic yet very dark read. I can’t recommend it enough. It takes you back to that utterly lost, utterly terrified mindset that the entire world experienced in March of 2020.

If you are a fan of Serie A soccer and Italian food you will enjoy it but it ain’t just about that. Look at the date of the piece and the darkness will make sense. It was right at the start of the pandemic and Thompson was under quarantine when he should have been in Italy writing about Serie A and enjoying todays meal.

His descriptions of the dish and its simplicity made me take my handy phone message app and jot down “Pasta Amatriciana” as a possible future menu for this here Sunday Gravy type deal. Yes, that’s how the brain really works over here.

Just needed a handful of ingredients to make this I thought. Should be easy peasy I thought. Probably have trouble finding the guanciale I thought. What could go wrong I thought?

HAH!

It was the pandemic shithead, what couldn’t go wrong?

I found guanciale. What I couldn’t find for over TWO FUCKING YEARS!!!! was bucatini.

Remember hoarding? Assholes grabbing shit so nobody else could have any fuckface type of behaviour? Dry goods and pasta especially?

Yep.

There really was and in some cases still is a world-wide bucatini shortage. Details here.

The main point was pasta companies just busted as much ass as possible making familiar basic pasta shapes like your spaghettis and your elbow macaroni and shit and a more labor or factory intensive pasta such as bucatini just stopped getting made.

At this point you’re probably saying “Yeah right? The fuck man? You make your own goddamn pasta why didn’t you use that?”

Settle down my vulgar friend. First off my brain said it had to be bucatini pasta. Period. Much like my tracking down a bottle of extremely expensive Pappy Van Winkle bourbon rather than another type of bourbon, it was because of the way Wright Thompson described the dish in that article.

The reason I didn’t make homemade bucatini?

Look at this shit!

I just ain’t got the kitchen toys to pull that shit off.

Finally, just a couple of weeks ago I found some goddamn bucatini. Over two years after I wrote down this idea for a Sunday Gravy post!

Right here in Pedro. At a little family owned Italian market and import place that I’ve frequented in the past.

I felt like I found a unicorn that both laid golden eggs and shit four leaf clovers. 

Here she is!

And they had my guanciale too.

Away we go!

Bucatini Amatriciana!

2 oz of fine quality Italian olive oil

Bucatini pasta cooked al dente

Some guanciale – or cured pork jowl – cut into cubes. About 4 ounces. You could technically use pancetta if guanciale is not available.

1 28 oz can of whole peeled San Marzano tomatoes squished by hand

3/4 cup of grated Pecorino Romano cheese

Salt, black pepper, red chili flakes.

Pasta water for correcting the viscosity of the sauce.

That’s it! No onion. No garlic. That’s the fucking ingredient list.

We’re going to be as minimalistic and authentic as possible today. The temptation to overwhelm a recipe is strong and very real. A rookie mistake is to throw in as many ingredients as you can when the actual answer in some cases, Italian cooking especially, is to keep it as simple as can be.

A few simple high quality ingredients will be all you need.

One of the key ingredients is a familiar one.

I’ve been using a lot of San Marzano tomatoes lately. Now that I can find them regularly at my grocery store why the fuck wouldn’t I?

Here’s the other elusive ingredient.

That would be the bagged and tagged guanciale if the photo isn’t clear enough.

Let’s begin.

Dump the tomatoes into a bowl and scrape out as much of the remaining sauce from the can as possible.

Since the dish today is simple and comes together very quickly you just know I had to amp up the difficulty factor didn’t you?

Of fucking course I did. Recipe here just in case.

Also found at the local Italian market was this.

If the photo is difficult to see that’s real imported Sicilian olive oil. The market has some really nice oils, wines, meats and cheeses too.

Let’s get that hog jowl out of the package.

Guanciale is sort of similar to bacon but not quite. It’s salt cured but not smoked so the flavor profile isn’t the same at all. What is the same is pork fatty deliciousness.

Give it a dice.

You want to cube it pretty small so you can render out a good amount of the fat.

Heat up the olive oil over medium heat, then add in the cubes of pork jowl.

Cook for several minutes until you get it crispy.

Honestly I could have gotten these a bit crispier. We’ll get to that in a bit.

Give those whole tomatoes a thorough squishing.

One of the other key ingredients…

This is cooks choice as far as amount. If you want a tamer sauce then use less. Shit man, it’s red pepper flake. Do your magic with it. Make the sauce your own.

Cook the crushed tomatoes in the rendered pork fat over medium/low heat. Add in the red pepper flake, in my case it was about 1/8 of a teaspoon, along with a dash of salt and some good grinds of freshly grated black pepper. Simmer on medium/low for about 25-30 minutes.

Take note: You may remove the crispy guanciale before adding the tomatoes. You can add the pork at the end of the cooking process to keep it crispy. I kept cooking it in the pan with the sauce and the pork was a little on the flabby/fatty side when done. I will definitely remove the crispy pork and add it at the end next time.

While the sauce is simmering let’s get after the pasta.

You want to salt your pasta water “like the sea” prior to cooking the pasta. It’s your only real opportunity to season the bucatini itself.

Last key ingredient is this smelly fellow.

Of all of the cheeses, pecorino romano will be the first one to tell you if you wrapped your leftover cheese tightly enough.

Every time you open your refrigerator.

Motherfucker is FRAGRANT.

Grate some up already.

Here’s our bucatini again. See? It’s really real!

Drop it into the boiling salted water.

Cook until al dente. It was probably 8 minutes or so. Remember the sauce will finish cooking the pasta so al dente is important. We’ve got these high class ingredients we don’t want to fuck them up with a squishy-ass pasta now do we?

Scoop out a cup of the pasta water and set it aside before draining – BUT NOT RINSING! – your pasta.

Add the pasta to the sauce along with about half of the grated cheese..

Stir until the cheese is melted and you have a good idea of the thickness of the sauce. You can then adjust the viscosity of the sauce with the reserved pasta water.

Plate up with the homemade bread. Be sure to add some of the remaining Pecorino Romano over the top.

Get in close.

It’s beautiful.

The reason why bucatini is loved is because the little hole that runs the length of the pasta absorbs the sauce giving the dish a saucier element. And shouldn’t all of life be just a little saucier? I’ve read that some folks intentionally choose regular spaghetti instead of the bucatini because there is no hole in spaghetti. If you slurp your pasta and it flings around while you’re slurping it some say the sauce just flings everywhere staining your clothes.

Well, don’t slurp your goddamn pasta you heathen. Twirl it properly around your fork like a fucking civilized person.

The pork was a bit fatty which could have been adjusted by adding it right at the end of the cooking process as mentioned above. Did I eat the fatty pork anyway. People? You know I did. This sauce is fantastic. You can taste each individual element and they all proudly stand out. The rich acidity of the tomatoes, the salty funkiness of the cheese, the back-end heat of the red pepper flake. They’re all there.

The bucatini is a wonderful pasta too. It really does take on more sauce and the chew is perfect. 

This dish is a perfect example of how simplicity can sometimes be the best way to go.

It paired really goddamn well with that homemade garlic bread and I had a damn fine pinot noir along side.

Cibo delizioso!

This one is a keeper. I still have half a pack of the bucatini and I think I’ll try the pancetta next time just to satisfy my personal curiosity but I just had to go true authentic since there were so few ingredients.

Thank you for the inspiration Wright Thompson. I hope you eventually did make your trip to Italy.

Been a pleasure folks.

Hope you have a great Sunday and I can’t wait to see you again next week.

Be well.

PEACE!