Tuesday 16 October 2018

Pasta with bacon, saffron sauce and zucchini flowers

5 minutes to prepare Serves 4



10 MINUTES

 

I tend to prepare too many first-course pasta recipes on this blog.

That's of course because I live in Italy and we all love it in any shape or size.
Moreover, I use to cook pasta during the weekend, while opening a bottle of wine to unwind, using the greens and vegetables just grabbed at the supermarket, and embellishing it with some pantry favourites (almonds, sun-dried tomatoes, anchovies, smoked bacon). No recipe, no amounts, no pre-planning. Just a relaxed, last-minute meal made even better by the endless possibilities of the weekend stretching ahead of us.

Pretty much all of my recipes are easy and simple, but sometimes pasta just seems too obvious to blog about. That is if you do not consider all the techniques that are extremely common here, but are not trivial if pasta does not belong to your cuisine. 

If I look up how to make an authentic curry or how they cook rice in Japan, there must be someone in India or Japan wondering how much to salt their pasta water or how to get their sauce creamy without adding butter.

What may be second nature to some of us, isn't necessarily so for others. Sometimes we just need flavor guidelines to boost our confidence when trying to cook something new.
Enjoy!


Here are ingredients for the 4-serving recipe:

 


400 g pasta
100 g bacon
20 zucchini flowers
100 ml fresh cream
1 teaspoon saffron
salt and pepper

  1. Cut the bacon into cubes of equal size
  2. Place the pieces of bacon in a pan preheated over medium heat. Do not add any oil so that it fries in its own fat 
  3. Once it has become golden, add the cream directly into the pan and cook for a few minutes until the cream is well mixed with the bacon fat 
  4. Meanwhile, cook the pasta in boiling salted water
  5. Pick up a ladle of water from the pasta and use it to melt the saffron; then add it to the sauce of cream and sausage in the pan and mix well
  6. Wash, clean, chop zucchini flowers and keep aside
  7. Drain pasta al dente. Add pasta to the sauce and season it with salt and pepper according to your taste
  8. Add fresh zucchini flowers and pan-fry the pasta over medium heat for 2 minutes. Serve immediately!

Nutrition Facts are listed for this recipe in the table below. Data is provided per serving.


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