Dinner For One: Bucatini All'Amatriciana

Having not prepared a meal for myself in weeks (I can be a lazy bastard, and there are restaurants everywhere), I had a deep urge to make myself one of my favorite pasta dishes: Bucatini all’Amatriciana.

I followed the recipe out of a Batali book once, and now stick pretty much to that. That version consists of bucatini noodles(like a larger spaghetti with a hole in the middle) with a sauce of guanciale, onion, garlic, chiles, tomato (canned San Marzano), and a hearty grating of Pecorino Romano to finish.

In a curious state of mind (too much coffee, augmented with beers), I took a look into the variations of the dish. Whenever I do this, I get very confused, especially when the dish is Italian – regional cooking differences are never more pronounced than in Italy.

Guanciale from Oyama, $6 per jowl. The fat to flesh ratio is intense.

Because of the name, you’d assume the dish originated in the town of Amatrice, but just down the road in Rome, they claim the name means nothing and they were the true originators. Scouring a few of my Italian cookbooks, and with some internet research, I found the only constant to be the use of guanciale (cured, un-smoked pork jowl). Some versions have onion, some don’t; some with garlic, some not; in Amatrice thick spaghetti is used instead of bucatini – it’s enough to make your head spin. There is even a “white” version, supposedly a recipe that pre-dates tomatoes, which consists of guanciale, black pepper and generous amounts of pecorino romano. As confusing as all this is when you are trying to find the “authentic” version of a dish, I find it interesting how a dish can change over the centuries, and how towns a mere fifty miles apart can have such different versions of it. At the end of the day, all that matters is that it tastes good – and that you use fucking bucatini!

Oh yeah, and I put parsley in mine too, something which apparently is a no-no to purists!