BA’s Best is our vault of the Test Kitchen’s definitive takes on iconic dishes. Today, food director Chris Morocco breaks down his latest recipe, a restaurant-worthy pasta dish you can pull off on a weeknight.
I didn’t grow up with southern Italian dishes like orecchiette with sausage and broccoli rabe, most likely because it originates in Puglia, a region close to my grandmother’s Campania. Her mistrust of the Pugliese, the home province of many of her neighbors in Worcester, MA, was infamous in our family. “Horse eaters” she would whisper, and flick her curtains closed.
Yet this is one of the easiest foundational Italian dishes to make, in a matter of minutes with some basic ingredients. It is balanced in a way that few other pastas could hope for, containing an abundance of greens to counter punchy sausage and handfuls of Parmesan.
Shockingly, Bon Appétit didn’t have a classic recipe for it. That is, until now. I got to work in the Test Kitchen—here are my big takeaways.
Too much ink has been spilled trying to convince home cooks that there are definitive pairings between sauces and pasta shapes. I don’t think your amatriciana gives a hoot if you use strozzapreti or gemelli. Yet I can’t deny the charms of orecchiette for this dish, as the “little ears” are perfectly sized and shaped to cradle nubbins of sausage, and be swaddled by clingy leaves of broccoli rabe. Any short shape will play nicely with the other elements—mezzi rigatoni and lumache especially. Be sure to leave the pasta very al dente before draining, since it will continue cooking with the greens and sausage.
Blanching—a brief dip into simmering salted water—isn’t nearly assertive enough to tame the fibrous stalks of broccoli rabe. To get them truly silky and tender, I give the bottom half of the stalks a 5-minute head start in boiling water, followed by 5-ish more minutes with the tops. There’s no need to shock in ice water or cold water afterward. These fully cooked greens are so luscious, they function almost like a sauce, with some help from cooking liquid and butter.
Italian-style sausage has the sharp scent of fennel, lots of garlic and black pepper, and, in hot varieties, red pepper flakes. If you can find it loose, great, but generally, you will have to remove the casings yourself to reveal the coarsely ground meat. This coarse grind is another key aspect to the dish, as it results in pebble-size chunks that render and crisp without turning into paste.
For years I undercooked my broccoli rabe, barely blanching it to temper some bitterness, yet leaving it so fibrous that even a longer cook with the sausage could never fully unlock its silky potential. I know better now. My colleagues in the Test Kitchen were floored by how delicious an overcooked vegetable can be—how the rabe became creamy like a green sauce, tangling around every other ingredient. It’s not every day you find a dish that you can make just as well as what you might order in a restaurant, after a long work day no less. But this is one of them.
