Pasta With Sausage and Parm

By Sam Sifton

Published February 16, 2019

  • David Malosh for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Simon Andrews. Prop Stylist: Paige Hicks.
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This is a no-recipe recipe, a recipe without an ingredients list or steps. It invites you to improvise in the kitchen. I like cooking the sausages twice for this pasta dish: first as links, to firm them up; then as coins, which get good and crisp in a melting knob of butter, releasing fat that, with a few leaves of sage and a splash of the water in which you cooked the pasta, makes for a terrific sauce for the pound of orecchiette in your pasta pot. Start by putting some neutral oil in a hot pan and searing the links, pricking them with a fork if they threaten to split. Boil your pasta water, salted as always. Retrieve the sausages from the pan when the skins are golden and crisp, let cool slightly, then cut into coins. While the pasta cooks, wipe out the pan and add some butter to it and the sausage coins; cook over medium heat. Scatter sage leaves over the whole, drain the pasta, and add a little of the pasta water to the pan with the sausage to make a velvety sauce. Combine with the pasta, grate a lot of Parmesan over the top, and let me know how it goes. Sam Sifton features a no-recipe recipe every Wednesday in his What to Cook newsletter. Sign up to receive it. You can find more no-recipe recipes here.

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Max Alexander, Rome, Contestant MasterChef Italia 2020-2021

The shape of orecchiette, the pasta of Puglia, is designed to hold small bits of meat from the sugo or sauce. Coins of sausage defeat this purpose, to say nothing of the fussy double-cooking technique. Instead do as they do in Bari: remove the sausage casing, break up the meat and proceed to cook it. You’ll get a little sausage tucked inside every “little ear.”

William Wroblicka

Blanching a bunch of broccoli rabe, chopped, in the pasta pot and adding it, drained along with the pasta, to the sausage gets you your serving of a green vegetable with little additional effort.

Alex

Update - I cooked this last night. I followed the general directions but loved adding my own twist. I made a combo of hot and sweet sausage. added broccoli rabe removed cheese until the end. Cooked the broccoli rabe in the sausage grease (after cooking S twice as instructed). Made it with bow tie pasta. Added grated cheese at the end.

TF

This is a no recipe recipe. My version is to use rapini broccoli with garlic and red pepper flakes. I brown the sausage in a skillet and blanche the rapini in the pasta water before throwing it all together. All you need is a little pasta water and parm or peccorino for a great sauce.

Sandy

I make this frequently since it is both easy and delicious. What more could you want? I generally use smoked sausage as it adds less fat than some others, and I like it better. That buttery sage sauce - mmmm.

Leslie

Super easy and tasty.

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