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Creamy, sweet and indulgent is what I would describe this pasta dish. What I wanted to do with this particular recipe was get the sausage as fine as possible, like a crumble, and using a food processor helped achieve that. This cream sauce sort of reminded me of a sausage gravy, it was so indulgent with the mascarpone and adding the salty pecorino and toasted pistachios helped balance everything out.
SAUSAGE, MASCARPONE AND PISTACHIO PASTA
Recipe by Mark Calaminici | Food Loves Company
Serves 4
Ingredients
4 tbsp. Extra virgin olive oil
2 cloves garlic, smashed but kept whole
4 sweet sausages, casing removed and broken up
1/2 cup white wine
275g mascarpone
1 cup heavy cream
Nutmeg, to taste
500g Rigatoni or any tube pasta
40g Pecorino Romano, finely grated, more for garnish
80g pistachios, shelled, toasted and finely chopped
Method
1. In a pan on medium-high heat, add 4 tbsp. Extra virgin olive oil and garlic. Sauté garlic until fragrant and then add sausage. Brown the sausage and you can break up the sausage up into pieces with a wooden spoon. I like to brown up the sausage as they start to get crispy, so let the sausage sit a bit undisturbed to get a bit crispy and colour. You will see the pan may have some fond developing and that will get released when we add the wine. Remove garlic when sausage is cooked to your liking and deglaze with white wine. Reduce and cook the wine down and then remove sausage, leaving any liquid in the pan as it’ll help build our sauce. Place the sausage into a food processor and pulse until you get a sausage crumble. Add the sausage back to the pan along with the mascarpone, cream and season with salt and freshly grated nutmeg. Keep in mind the Pecorino is salty so just be careful when seasoning with salt. Give a mix and let everything simmer and come together, stirring frequently. You can bring the heat down to low at this point.
2. Cook the rigatoni in a large pot of boiling salted water just before al dente, as we will finish cooking the pasta in the sauce. Reserve pasta water.
3. Bring the heat back up to medium and add pasta to the pan with a ladle of pasta water. Continue to cook the pasta in the pan, stirring and tossing, adding more pasta water if needed. Turn off the heat or remove the pan from the head and add the Pecorino, a handful at a time and mix and toss to incorporate into the pasta. You can add more pasta water if you want a bit of a looser sauce. Plate it up with some extra sauce, pecorino and of course the toasted pistachios.