One of my all-time favourite pasta dishes, a recipe learned from a young chef on one of those magical nights in Rome. Bucatini with king prawns and a spectacular sauce of three forms of tomato—hence "Il tricorno" ("the three-cornered hat") —and dried basil. Just cook it , already!
Another of those great Italian dishes that uses relatively simple ingredients but becomes exceptional through cooking it with patience and love. It's pretty easy to cook, but it's not a quick recipe. To get it right, you need to allow two—preferably three—hours to slow cook the sauce at the heart of this dish. That said, if you cook it in these quantities or greater, once your tomato sauce is cooked, it stores in the fridge for days and freezes really well. This makes it the ideal dish for people who live on their own because on at least two other occasions, all they'll need to do is cook some pasta, sizzle some prawns and add them to a reheating sauce for a restaurant-worthy dinner. And I mean that quite literally in this case.
"I was in the eternal city for a few days, following the mania of art directing a photo shoot..."
Yes, this is another of my dishes that comes with a long story, so just scroll down to the part where you cook it if you have not interest in that aspect.
I learned this recipe from a young chef in Rome. A while back, when I was in the eternal city for a few days, following the mania of art directing a photo shoot that saw us whizzing around the city. After arriving early and spending a couple of days checking out shoot locations on my own, I was hungry.
My partner and friend were arriving at different times, bookending the photoshoot before our little holiday that would kick off once the shoot was done. So, I left the hotel on the Palatine and wandered almost aimlessly. I was already familiar with the eateries in the surrounds of the hotel and wanted to try something new. I was drawn towards the Via Urbana. I'd already clocked the interesting food culture on it and in the surrounding side streets while location scouting. But, I hadn't yet had a chance to eat at what appeared to me to be interesting "neo artisanal" restaurants with a far more serious gastronomic approach than those in hipster Trastevere. I wasn't wrong.
It was one of those places with a small menu written on a chalkboard where the maggiordomo comes over and talks you through them. I politely sat through his spiel even though I knew what I wanted before he started speaking. Bucatini is one of my favourite pastas. It originates in Lazio, the region in which Rome is located. So here was my chance to do "when in Rome...". And, incidentally, I had found it disappointingly absent on the menus in the places we had eaten while shooting in the region a year earlier.
Before the dude even finished asking me if I had any questions, I blurted out, "Vorrei i bucatini il tricorno, per favore." He smiled in an odd way.
"Umberto ci ha consigliato?" he asked. Now, I had no idea who Umberto was; worried for a minute that I might have inadvertently stumbled into some kind of Mafia Capitale situation. "Did Umberto recommend you?" You can see where my paranoia was going. But it felt like not a bad thing. I politely told him I had just chanced upon the place.
"Ah! La fortuna ti ha dato un buon istinto, signore," he said. And then he wafted enigmatically into the kitchen.
I could almost feel the spectre of my father grinning at me as I ate what was one of the best dishes I have ever eaten in Rome. He would have adored this dish. And, yes, that is saying something. I savoured every morsel.
"...wondering if Gore Vidal had walked the same streets when he was here in the early 50s, finding existential moments in little osterias."
I had arrived pretty late in the evening. So, by the time I was ordering a digestivo, the chef wondered out of the kitchen for a break over a glass of wine. He stopped by my table to ask me how I found the food. He was beaming as I heaped on the praise, probably because he sensed that I really meant it. I invited him to join me and we sat there talking until his wife eventually appeared and started pointedly tuning off lights hours later.
One of the things that I adore about Italy is that chefs love sharing their recipes, something my father had told me about when he first taught me to cook as a kid. And, like him on his Italian food quests, I learned this to be true in my own adult food pilgrimages to Italy.
Chef Luca was no exception. During our conversation I learned a lot about him. He was originally from the coastal town of Sperlonga; delighted that I knew it and that my partner and I love the place. He and his wife had a two-year-old daughter, Allegra, named for his mother, and they probably should have thought it through before launching an osteria when she was barely six months old, he told me. His wife had studied economics in London and he'd worked in restaurants to be with her before the married, but he hated it because he got jobs in gastropubs to learn about English cooking but they only wanted him to cook Italian dishes...
Yeah, I'm sure you're loving the narrative, but these are 3 things to which you need to pay attention to get this recipe right: |
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In between all the ways you get to know a stranger on a serendipitous late spring night in Rome, Luca taught me the recipe in great detail, even insisting I write it down. See, that's what I love about Italian chefs: eager to share everything rather than the paranoid guardianship of some supposed IP; some secret ingredient or method.
I learned that it was his mother—"the best cook in Lazio"—who had passed this recipe on to him. I learned it was called "Il tricorno" because it uses tomatoes in three different forms; a "three-cornered hat".
And, most importantly, I later learned that there was nothing misleading or left out of what he taught me when I got home and tried it because whenever I cook it I can tell that any lacking in my renditions are minor and down to my lack of his consummate skill and not because I have been misled—trust me I've been there and I am a good enough cook to recognise an intentional omission. Nonetheless, even I can make it one of the most spectacular dishes in my Italian repertoire.
And, of course, it has a deep meaning for me. That night as I wondered back up the Palatine through quiet streets, I couldn't help wondering if Gore Vidal had walked the same streets when he was here in the early 50s, finding existential moments in little osterias.
This recipe is for two to three diners and is easily scaled up.
Shopping list
for the bucatini in tomato sauce with king prawns and dried basil
Approx. 60-70g dried bucatini per diner (good luck finding fresh)
Approx. 11 or 12 raw king prawns per diner; shelled and cleaned
1 tspn of virgin olive oil
1 clove of garlic, very finely grated
A little fresh lemon juice
for the tomato sauce
1 x 400g tin of chopped plum tomatoes
Approx. 250g fresh cherry tomatoes (or baby plum tomatoes)
1 large brown onion, chopped into small cubes
1 large red bell pepper, chopped into small cubes
2 tbspns extra virgin olive oil
the juice of 1 fresh lemon
500ml vegetable stock (without any herbs in it)
2 tbspns concentrated tomato purée (not passata!)
4 cloves of garlic, peeled and roughly chopped
1 tspn peperoncino chillies, minced
250ml white wine
1 tspn turmeric
2 tbspns dried basil leaves (purple or green)
black pepper and salt to taste
for the salad and accompaniment
Baby gem lettuce
Cucumber
Chopped spring onion
extra virgin olive oil
balsamic vinegar
a little extra virgin olive oil
fresh lemon zest
rustic bread
Cooking method
Chop the fresh tomatoes in a mini chopper or food processor adding only a little salt and pepper. Place to one side
Heat the olive oil in a large pot with a lid on a medium heat. Add approx.1 tspn of the roughly chopped garlic while the oil is still heating. Fold the remainder of the chopped garlic into the chopped fresh tomatoes
When the garlic begins to sizzle, add the finely chopped onions and sauté, stirring almost constantly. After about 2mins, add the finely chopped red bell pepper and minced peperoncino chillies and stir. When they soften—or sooner if they begin to stick—add the lemon juice. If that cooks off too quickly, add some of the wine, a little at a time. Keep stirring
When the onion and pepper cubes are notably softened, pour in the rest of the wine and stir vigorously as it starts to cook off. Add your chopped fresh tomatoes with all that chopped garlic almost immediately and fold in. Add the turmeric and stir. Increase to a medium-high heat and cook down the ingredients for about 5 to 6mins—you basically want to make sure it's stop being "raw" before the next step
When the liquid has largely cooked out of the ingredients, add the dried purple basil and stir in. Add the chopped tinned tomatoes and their juice. While those are cooking, add your concentrated tomato purée to the empty tin and dissolve in your hot vegetable stock. Pour this into the pot and stir it in. Cover and reduce the heat to very low, to the point that the sauce is barely simmering
For at least the next 2 hours—ideally 3—stir the ingredients about every 15mins, ensuring that nothing sticks, adding the remaining liquid stock as you go and simmering gently, always covered. If it cooks down too quickly, simply add boiling water, approx 30ml at a time, and stir in. When the sauce has reduced to being fairly thick—you do not need to coax this one to reduce unless you really overdo the water—turn off and allow to rest, covered, while you prepare the bucatini, prawns and salad
Bring a large pot of salted water to the boil. While your bucatini is cooking, Flash-fry your king prawns in hot olive oil with the clove of very finely grated garlic—it needs to be finely grated so that it cooks quickly. Barely cook the prawns. When about ¾ cooked, remove from the heat and place to one side
Transfer the relevant amount of your sauce to a large, deep frying pan—I usually use a wok—and begin to reheat on a gentle heat. In the meanwhile, drain your cooked bucatini. As soon as the sauce is hot, increase to a high heat and throw both the drained bucatini and king prawns into the pan, ideally shaking or tossing the ingredients rather than stirring, until the prawns are perfectly cooked
Plate and take to table with the salad and any accompaniments and side dishes
Alternatives
This is a pescatarian dish and it works with many forms of shellfish—I've enjoyed it with crab, langoustines, scallops and smoked mussels, among others.
But, until you add the seafood in the final stages, it's essentially vegetarian, actually vegan. And, this tomato-led sauce is so great it really doesn't need anything else. I often eat it without any additional proteins precisely because it is so good and specific.
For carnivores, it's great with cubed guanciale and various kinds of sausages or bacons. But, a word of advice: still cook these separately and add them in the final stages as with the king prawns. I once made the mistake of adding chopped salsiccia sausages in the early stages, as one does with many similar sauces. It was very tasty, but there was a very definite sense that the fat in the meat overwhelmed the subtlety of what the tomatoes and dried basil achieve in Luca's recipe.
Pairings
This is another of those dishes that is "colour agnostic" where wine is concerned. The default seafood and subtle flavours of the dried purple basil tend towards whites—what I've opted for tonight—even though there aren't any rules with this one. It works so well with a refined Viré-Clessé—or it's familial bloodlines, those better known Mâconnais whites that remind us why we love Burgundy.
But, I equally love it with those bold, brassy Sicilian catarattos; the sunburned town tart who brings big-breasted fun to the table. Or, as a nod to Luca's home region of Lazio, Federici Roma Malvasia Puntinata, with which I particularly remember enjoying it.
But, my overall, all-time winner is Domaine Marengo Emiliu 2014, a fairly light grenache red (yes, they also make rosé with this grape) from Corsica that is served slightly chilled. Barely an hour into knowing Luca he confessed that he came over to my table because I had ordered this wine (I can't remember if it was the 2014; probably not because it would have been an infant at that time). He was curious as to who had ordered the least-ordered wine on their list but the one he most recommended to go with this dish.
And, on top of it, he heard from the kitchen that I insisted the staff help me finish the bottle. Why not? I reminded him that I was dining alone.
He looked at me with suspicious eyes and said: "Penso che non sarebbe una lotta per te fino alla seconda bottiglia, amico mio. Salute!" Or, something to that effect.
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