Orecchiette with Sausage & Cherry Tomatoes

Another interesting recipe I saw in this month's Food & Wine magazine was for a simple pasta dish using sausage. It looked intriguing enough for me to get the few ingredients and wait for an opportunity to try it. Getting home from the city too late for Pilates last night, we did have enough time to put together this wickedly easy recipe. There's comments of what we changed and a picture of how ours turned out below...

The dish as seen in the magazine:


Food & Wine, November 2011 Issue:
Using sausage in place of ground meat is a good sauce shortcut, because it's already seasoned. For a salty, creamy finish, Marc Vetri stirs in shredded provolone cheese before serving.

• 1 pound orecchiette
• 1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil
• 3/4 pound sweet Italian sausage, casings removed
• 1 pint cherry tomatoes, halved
• 1/2 teaspoon crushed red pepper
• Salt
• 2 ounces aged provolone, shredded

In a large pot of boiling salted water, cook the pasta until al dente. Drain the pasta, reserving 3/4 cup of the cooking water.

Meanwhile, in a large, deep skillet, heat 1 tablespoon of the olive oil until shimmering. Add the sausage in 1-inch clumps and cook over moderately high heat, turning once, until browned and cooked through, about 8 minutes. Using a slotted spoon, transfer the sausage to a plate.

Add 2 tablespoons of the olive oil to the skillet along with the tomatoes and crushed red pepper; cook over moderately high heat, pressing the tomatoes until slightly softened, about 4 minutes. Add the reserved pasta cooking water, season with salt and cook over moderate heat, scraping up any browned bits and crushing the tomatoes, until the liquid is reduced by half and the tomatoes are nearly broken down, about 5 minutes.

Add the pasta to the skillet along with the sausage and the remaining 1 tablespoon of olive oil and cook, stirring, until the pasta is evenly coated, about 3 minutes. Remove from the heat and stir in the provolone. Transfer to bowls and serve right away.

First, the taste. Pretty damn good! The alterations I made to the recipe while cooking were minor. When cooking the tomatoes and red pepper, I added a heaping teaspoon of minced garlic (we keep that monster size container of crushed garlic from Costco in the fridge). I also added, in addition to the shredded provolone, a big handful of a shredded Italian blend cheese (mozzarella, provolone, asiago, parmesan & romano) we had in the fridge.

Second, what we'd change next time. Following the recipe above netted us too much pasta. You can see I used I different shape since I couldn't find any Orecchiette at Wegmans. Next time we'd cut down the amount of pasta...maybe use only half a box or three quarters. Either that or we'd have to almost double all of the other ingredients to get it to be a bit more even of a sausage to tomato to pasta ratio. Alan suggested that next time we try and get it to be a bit saucier as well. So either we'll add tomato pasta or see if adjusting the pasta quantity gives it more wetness.

The Italian sweet sausage gives a great flavor and the pepper flakes add a little bite. The cheese made it creamy and salty. Cooking time was about twenty minutes in total and the house smelled great. Overall, can't wait to do this one again!