Bucatini

Tangy caramelized kimchi adds much appreciated acidity to an Italian classic. This version will soon become your new favorite. 

Unlike marinara sauce, which takes an hour or more to reduce, pomodoro sauce is light, bright, and comes together in a fraction of the time. 

Mushrooms just need a quick sear in a hot pan before being tossed with pasta and cream in this easy weeknight dinner.

The key to this classic pesto recipe is to add the basil at the very end, instead of blending everything all at once—that way, the basil maintains its flavor and vibrant green color.

In this extra cheesy, extra comforting meal, spaghetti pie meets an Italian classic: cacio e pepe.

Lemon makes the perfect foil for carbonara’s salty richness. You may never go back.

Cook breadcrumbs—mixed with bright lemon zest and garlic—until toasted and crunchy and then try not to inhale them before garnishing this spicy anchovy pasta.

It's hard not to love this classic Italian pasta—it's just the right mix of spicy and sweet.

Brown butter and sage create a rich, complex sauce in just a few short steps for this simple pasta.

That parsley in your fridge is lonely! Let it hang with chiles and walnuts for your next weeknight pasta.

That parsley in your fridge is lonely! Let it hang with chiles and walnuts for your next weeknight pasta. 

This recipe is a prime example of how to cut calories without sacrificing flavor. We use a ton of vegetables and just a handful of flavorful sausage. Don't skimp on the time needed to wilt down the vegetables, because that time adds sweetness to the sauce.

Roasting the pancetta in one large piece renders out most of the fat, making it easy to dice into perfect 1/4" pieces.

Think of this as a carbonara, but with tomatoes in place of the eggs.

No endless simmering and stirring for this garlicky pasta sauce. Here, canned tomatoes are oven-roasted, which intensifies their flavor while cutting down on fuss.

Harvests from the great, silent fields of sun-bronzed wheat result in more bread than pasta for la tavola siciliana, yet there is a trio of pasta dishes that is cooked throughout the island. One of them dresses pasta in eggplant and tomatoes perfumed with wild mint and basil, the whole dusted with grated, salted ewe’s milk ricotta. Called often pasta alla Norma in celebration of Catanian son Vincenzo Bellini it can be a gorgeous dish. Then there is pasta chi vrocculi arriminati—dialect for a dish that calls for a paste of cauliflower and salt anchovies studded with raisins and pine nuts. Although it is luscious, it cannot compete with the glories of the island’s pasta con le sarde. A dish full of extravagant Arab timbres, it employs fresh, sweet sardines, salt anchovies, wild fennel, and a splash of saffroned tomato. One presents the pasta cool, as though heat would be violence against its sensuousness. Wild fennel grows abundantly on the lower shanks of Sicily’s mountains and, too, along the craggy paths of some of her islands. I used to collect wild fennel along the banks of the Sacramento River and I’ve heard tell of great clumps of its yellow lace heads bobbing along country roads in America’s Northeast. Now I find it a few kilometers from our home in thickets against the pasture fences along the Via Cassia on the road to Rome. Though the scent and the savor of cultivated fennel is sweeter, it behaves well in collaboration with these other elements and yields a still-sumptuous dish.

An inordinately rustic dish, it asks so little of the larder and the cook and gives up good, potent flavor. The Lucani are wont to add another crushed chile to the pasta at table or under a tree, as the case may be.

Mussels unfettered by garlic taste more like their own sweet, turgid selves. On the tiny porch of the seaside bar where we ate this pasta, the cook who was the mussel gatherer who was the bartender who was the pastrymaker added crushed, dried seaweed to the finished dish. He cooked the mussels and the pasta over a fire he’d built of driftwood a few meters from the bar. It was a fairly good-sized blaze, ample enough to heat an old cauldron along with the mussel pot, it bubbling with a potion of wild myrtle berries in which he immersed a great, gray fish net, tinting it, cooking it to a deep, bright blue.