Many Italian restaurants serve some version of orecchiette with rapini (also called broccoli rabe). This famous dish from Puglia combines chewy “little ear” pasta with the leafy crucifer that is an ancestor to our modern broccoli. Typically the preparation involves sausage or anchovy and a bit of hot red pepper.
During my time as a restaurant critic for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, I tasted too many attempts that missed the mark because the chefs trod too lightly with the rapini’s angry, in-your-face bitterness. These greens, served blanched and bright green, too often tasted like chewing on aspirin against a backdrop of bland pasta.
When dealing with bitter flavors, I try to think like a bartender. Bitters are essential to cocktails, but they have to be balanced with equally strong flavors. In a cocktail, that means sugar, acid and alcohol. In a pasta, it means salt, fat, hot spice and (yeah, that word) umami.
Over the years, I’ve developed a recipe that requires a small shopping list at a good supermarket and comes together with one pot and one pan. Any orecchiette works, though the De Cecco brand is commonly available and great. Likewise, many markets with good produce departments stock excellent Andy Boy rapini (marketed as broccoli rabe) from California. Depending on the season and whether you buy the organic or conventionally farmed product, it can be more or less bitter. That leaves it to you to turn the dials on the other ingredients to get the bitterness in check. Both anchovies and grating cheese have umami to spare.
There is one ingredient that makes this dish sing for me, and that is Calabrian hot red peppers packed in oil. They’re easy to find in an Italian market or order online; however, red pepper flakes work as an alternative.
Credit: John Kessler
Credit: John Kessler
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