First, a word from our lawyers. (No, not really.)
This is not a recipe. I hate all those self-important food blogs that want to tell you a condensed memoir and bury a recipe after an extended diatribe. There is something to be said for food writing. Those posts? Not food writing. If I can't taste what you ate from your words, imagine the scents and mouthfeel, get lost in your prose, then I don't want it.
(I do very much get that search engines make it hard for recipe creators to make money on what they’re doing… I’m just asking for the stories that accompany to be more useful and food-oriented. Because I’m a jerk.)
Besides, when it comes to pasta, I really don't use recipes.
One of the great joys of being in Italy is of course cooking in Italy. It isn't just the fact that there are ingredients in abundance I can't easily get stateside; I have some asinine romantic notion of a connection to my history via food.
And when I say "asinine romantic," I do mean that in all honesty. Here I'm cooking bucatini all'amatriciana, a perfect epitome of cucina laziale. My family is not and has never been from Lazio. It's not my history. Furthermore (if we really want to get into the historical accuracy of the dish) it should be tomato-free.
When I lived in Bologna, my roommates were amazed that I knew how to cook Italian food. None of our friends cooked – at best, they'd boil pasta and dump on some sauce that mamma sent from home. My American friends wanted to learn and, in teaching them, I learned that I can be an absolute tyrant in the kitchen. People wanted to improvise without a baseline understanding of how flavors meld nor the importance of handling things just so lest the texture be ruined.
It was a disaster, and – again – I am a jerk.
I prefer l'amatriciana with long, discernible strips of its ingredients. The soft sharp bite into a perfectly sautéed onion makes the process of chopping them all worth it. I'm one of those people who look a perfect horror chopping onions - sobbing, runny nose, the whole nine. Worth. It.
The real star of the dish is of course guanciale, a type of cured pork that comes from the cheeks (guance in Italian) and is porky, fatty, wonderful. It's typical of Central Italy, but this came from the deli counter at a supermarket in Tuscany, and I had no complaints.
A quick melancholic digression.
The news of Tony Bourdain's death came the day before, and it hit me harder than I would have expected. I don't know if I realized what a big fan I was, and not for the harsh, sometimes crass, badass rockstar persona, but for the way he traveled. Respectful, curious, warm, enthusiastic, adventurous, and joyful. He was my inspiration for a number of trips – mostly recently, Sénégal – and cooking something with love for people I love seemed like an appropriate way to honor him.
This trip made me question why lard has such a negative connotation – it's hard to imagine anything more magical and comforting than rendering pork fat to begin preparing a meal. The kitchen fills with an earthy smoke, the slices glisten and sparkle as they turn quickly transparent.
Next go the first round of peperoncino (red pepper flakes – not the sweet green pepper from pizza places) and our sliced onions. The way I learned to cook pasta is that certain ingredients are allowed to steep in the cooking oil as it heats, garlic and peperoncino in particular. This imbues the dish with a consistent but mellower bite of the flavor in question. If you like things spicy – as I certainly do – you add more at the end for the sharp kick and additional complexity.
Tomatoes get added as the onions are set on a low burner to soften, and this is where I'm quickly exposed as a heretic of sorts: I use canned tomatoes. Is it crazy? Maybe, but canned San Marzano tomatoes instead of some watery uncertain early-in-the-season pink things from the grocery store are my preference every single time. I use a combination of passata – like a purée but rougher – and pomodori pelati (skinless) that I slice again into long strips.
And now another bit of heresy: this sauce is wonderful on day two and beyond. Italians don't believe in leftovers, but I'm going to lean into my Americanness wholeheartedly to say that day three bucatini all'amatriciana pan fried and lightly burnt with lots of stinky pecorino is probably a top ten dish for me. I like my pasta sauce relatively tight – or as my dad called it as a kid, "pastashoota," properly rendered as pasta asciutta (dry) – so I let the tomato thicken up. While it's cooking, salt to taste and add more peperoncino for good measure.
Now there is one important thing that I should have mentioned at the beginning... get your water boiling. Use the biggest pot you have. Salt it well. Retain a cup of the water before draining just in case your sauce is too tight. Pasta should be cooked al dente or not at all. On this I am 100% purist, and it's frankly non-negotiable.
Now comes the good part. Once the sauce and pasta have been united and the sauce is as tight or loose as you like, portion it out and cover the mountain of pasta with a thick snowfall of grated pecorino romano.
The end result should be some kind of perfection: noodles with body and heft, a rich but not too heavy sauce redolent of earthy pork, soft sweet onions, bright fresh tomato, the lingering heat of the peperoncino, and just-slightly-funky-but-all-the-way-salty cheese. As a tribute dish to the memory of a constant inspiration, one could do worse. Buon appetito.