Italian · Sicily · main

Pasta con le Sarde

Pasta con le Sarde reads umami 7.7, marine & briny 6.7 and salinity 6.4 on Palate's 0–10 flavor X-ray — a Italian · Sicily main, about 49 min. Measured from the recipe itself: ingredients and technique.

The flavor X-ray — six axes, 0–10

The measured notes (of 18)

Umami 7.7 · Marine & Briny 6.7 · Salinity 6.4 · Richness 5.4 · Funk & Ferment 4.3 · Sweetness 4.0 · Nutty 3.9 · Allium 2.7 · Fruity 2.3 · Warm Spice 1.9 · Floral 1.7 · Bitterness 1.6 · Sourness 1.4 · Earthy 1.4 · Citrus 1.4 · Herbaceous 1.4

What's in it (12)

Time & effort: about 49 min · effort: involved

Nutrition (per 100 g, engine-estimated): 199.7 kcal, 12.2 g protein, 6.2 g fat, 23.1 g carbs

Dietary: Contains meat · Contains seafood — engine-derived; double-check anything allergy-critical.

How it's cooked (7 steps)

  1. Bring 3 litres of well-salted water to the boil and cook the wild fennel for 10 minutes, until the fronds are limp and the water smells sweetly of aniseed. Lift the fennel out with a spider, squeeze it dry over the pot and chop it roughly. Keep the green cooking water on a low simmer: the pasta cooks in it, and that is where half the flavour of this dish lives. Wild fennel is not the bulb and not dill; look for it in Sicilian and Middle Eastern greengrocers in spring, or cut it from a roadside in flower.
  2. Toast the breadcrumbs in a dry frying pan with 2 tbsp of the olive oil over medium heat for 3 to 4 minutes, stirring constantly, until they are the colour of wet sand and smell like a bakery. Tip them onto a plate at once, off the hot pan, or they will keep cooking and turn bitter.
  3. In a wide pan, sweat the sliced onion in 4 tbsp of the olive oil over medium-low heat for 10 minutes, until it is translucent and slack but has taken no colour at all. Add the anchovy fillets and press them with a wooden spoon for about 2 minutes; they will dissolve into the oil and the pan will smell savoury rather than fishy.
  4. Add the sultanas, pine nuts, the saffron with its steeping water and the chopped fennel. Simmer gently for 5 minutes so the saffron stains everything gold and the raisins plump.
  5. Cut half the sardines into rough pieces and stir them in with the salt and pepper. Cook 5 minutes over medium heat, breaking them up with the spoon until they collapse into the sauce and no whole pieces remain. Taste: it should read sweet, salty and faintly bitter all at once.
  6. In a separate pan, fry the remaining sardine fillets in the last 1 tbsp of oil over medium-high heat, 2 minutes on the skin side and 1 minute on the flesh side, just until set. Set them aside whole.
  7. Cook the bucatini in the reserved fennel water for 9 minutes, or 1 minute short of the packet time. Drain, reserving a cup of the water, and toss the pasta through the sauce over low heat for 1 minute, loosening with a splash of the fennel water until every strand is coated. Serve topped with the reserved fried sardines and a heavy scatter of the toasted breadcrumbs. No grated cheese: in Palermo this dish never sees it.

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Keep reading: what umami, marine & briny, salinity mean in the flavor lexicon · the world's cuisines, by flavor.

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Every number above is Palate's engine-measured estimate, computed from this recipe's ingredients and techniques — not human-tasted ratings or reviews.