Chef's pick
Pasta alla campidanese with sausage, saffron, and peas
Sardinia is my motherland, and this is the dish the island puts on the table when it wants to show off.
Malloreddus alla campidanese comes from the Campidano, the flat farming plain that runs down the south-west of the island between Cagliari and Oristano. Malloreddus are little ridged shells, sometimes sold abroad as gnocchetti sardi, and the sauce is sausage, tomato, and saffron. That is the whole idea. There is nothing clever in it and it has never needed anything clever.
What I remember is that it was never a weekday dish. Every wedding, every christening, every feast day for a village saint whose name I have long since lost, the first course was this and only this: pasta stained yellow, a sauce gone dark from an hour on the hob, and enough grated pecorino on top to worry a cardiologist. I was small enough to be under the table for most of it, at the height where you mainly experience a party as a forest of legs and a smell coming down from above. The smell was always saffron and fennel.
The saffron is not decoration and it is not optional. San Gavino Monreale, half an hour up the road from where the sauce was invented, grows a serious share of all the saffron in Italy, and the island has been putting it in food since the Middle Ages rather than treating it as a garnish for risotto. A pinch of threads, soaked in a little warm water for five minutes first so the colour and the smell actually come out, is the difference between this and any other sausage ragù.
Get coarse butcher's sausage if you can, take it out of its skin, and break it into rough lumps rather than crumbs. You want to find pieces of it later.
- Prep 10 min
- Cook 25 min
- Serves 2
- Cost €€
Method
- 1
Crumble the saffron threads into the warm water and leave them to steep while you get everything else going. Dropping dry threads straight into a pan gives you an expensive orange fleck and very little flavour.
5 min
- 2
Heat the oil in a wide pan, add the sausage in rough lumps, and leave it alone for three minutes so one side browns properly before you start breaking it up. Add the fennel seeds now if you are using them.
6 min
- 3
Add the onion with a pinch of salt and cook until soft and translucent, scraping up whatever the sausage left on the bottom.
6 min
- 4
Pour in the tomatoes and the saffron with all its soaking water, season, and simmer uncovered until the sauce darkens and the oil starts to separate at the edges.
This is the step that cannot be hurried. Fifteen minutes is the minimum, half an hour is better.
15 min
- 5
Put the pasta on. Stir the peas into the sauce for the last five minutes.
10 min
- 6
Drain the pasta a minute early, keeping a mug of the water, and finish it in the pan with the sauce and a splash of that water until it clings. Off the heat, stir through the pecorino and grind over plenty of pepper.
3 min
Variations
For a vegetarian version, replace the sausage with 150 g of cooked brown lentils and a heaped teaspoon of fennel seeds, and add a spoonful of tomato purée for depth. It is a genuinely good dish rather than a consolation prize.
The sauce is better on the second day and freezes without losing anything, so it is worth making a double batch of it and cooking fresh pasta to order.
A strip of roasted red pepper stirred in at the end is common in some households. Cream is not, anywhere, ever.