Roz does this thing where she makes or gets pasta every Monday so I decided to follow suit. Last week was a tiktok content creator's recipe and let's just say it was underwhelming, so it's been struck from the records and today marks the beginning of history.

Anyway, today's pasta was Lidia Bastianich's take on pasta all'amatriciana. As I understand it, in the town of Amatrice where this recipe hails from, using any vegetables at all in the sauce is considered sacrilege, but this recipe uses both onion and garlic. Honestly I am kind of a a stickler for tradition but also I love both of those so sure, why not. I've made the traditional amatriciana before and it's good too, fwiw

The recipe starts with guanciale, which is a hell of a lot easier to find these days than it was when I moved to California in 2016 I tell ya hwat. Back then you had to hunt down butchers to even have a chance at getting it; nowadays you can find it readily in stock at the more bougie markets like Bianchinis or Draegers.

I digress. Guanciale is way fattier than American bacon. The appeal is in the fat, to the degree that some recipes will call for you to render out the fat from guanciale and then skim out the meat entirely. That fat is what gives this recipe its body.

You can see the fat to meat ratio here in the lardons I cut up. Shit is well over 50% fat, yum yum. The strips in the back are the pork rind. It's not bad but has the consistency of shoe leather. I think you might be able to fry it up and make it more palatable, or at the very least use it to flavor soups kinda like you do with parmigiano reggiano rinds, but I was feeling lazy today so I tossed em.

Funnily enough the recipe doesn't start with rendering the fat like I thought it would. I'm used to that being the first step for pretty much any recipe with a fatty meat, but this one starts with onions and sweats em down until they're soft and getting translucent, adds garlic and olive oil, then clears it to the side to render the guanciale in the hottest part of the pan.

To be honest I don't really see the point of the olive oil or the onions first. I think if I made it again I'd go with rendering the guanciale first in a naked pan and then cook the onions in the pork fat. Anywho, once that all cooked down a bunch I added a can of tomatoes (again, San Marzano tomatoes have become a lot easier to find in the past decade) and let it simmer for a bit to reduce.

Meanwhile I melted some butter and gave it a quick whisk with salt, dried parsley (I'm lazy), and garlic powder (see above) for some easy garlic butter, then shoved it in the fridge to let it firm up a bit. I cut up with some nice thick slices of the sourdough boule I bought last Saturday, slathered on ungodly amounts of butter, grated some parm on top for good measure, and stuck it under the broiler.

After a few minutes, it was done. A third slice magically appeared in between the before and after because I had more butter left over than I expected.

Most versions of this recipe I've seen have called for bucatini or rigatoni, but lazy is the name of the game today so I used some pasta that has been in my pantry for prolly well over a year now. Besides, I find bucatini is kinda unwieldy to eat--I feel like it being a tube makes it a lot harder to twirl or even fork properly. Anyway, the rest is pretty standard stuff. Boil noodles, toss in sauce with pasta water, add some pecorino romano, more pasta water to loosen it up, yadda yadda ya.

8/10 would eat again (having tried both now, I prefer the version without onion and garlic), also that garlic bread was delicious

P.S. I unlocked a memory as I was typing this up: when I was living alone I used to make this with diced up spam instead of guanciale and you know what? That shit was GOOD. Italians come at me