No, not only Spanish occasionally fry the pasta. Italians do it too
ingredients for 4 servings (cost about 1,5 € pp)
- Salt
- 320 g linguine or bavette
- 0,25 g saffron powder
- EV olive oil
- 1 pepperoncino
- 1 garlic clove
- 150 ml tomato sauce (passata)
- basil leaves
This very strange pasta technique comes from Italy´s south, Puglia, a place with magnificent cuisine. It has also a very strange name, assassina which means the female murderer!!!! The classical version has no saffron and more tomato than the dish I present you today, but I wanted to create a slightly different version. I love using saffron along with tomato, a quarter of gram which costs less than a euro, turns the dish from common to prime.
It´s not a long time I know this pasta technique. I first tasted it with spaghetti but after some trials I think that wide shapes as linguine or bavette are better. Anyway, you can also use spaghetti.
So, we start with the stock. We fill a pot with a litre of filtered or mineral water and we add the tomato juice, the saffron and a pinch of salt.
We continue with the garlic. What have we said about garlic use? That if our preparation is relatively dry and there is a possibility that the garlic can be burnt, we don´t use it sliced or minced but we just heat it in olive oil and we later discard the solid part. You imagine what we have to do today with a preparation which must be “burnt”. We crush a garlic clove and, starting from cold pan, we gently fry it with a pepperoncino (or two) and some olive oil till golden. We discard the solid part of the garlic and we add the linguine.
We toss them well with the olive oil, adding some more if needed and we start frying them till pale to beige. We start adding a ladle of very hot tomato-saffron liquid every time the preparation becomes dry and we continue cooking at medium heat.
When the pasta is already done we raise the heat and we cook the pasta WITHOUT STIRRING IT for about 2 minutes. The linguine at the bottom of the preparation must be very crispy, lightly brown but not black, as they will be bitter and also unhealthy.
We put in plates and we serve garnishing with some small basil leaves. Tough men add some pepperoncino oil too.
