Pasta Recipes

It’s been far too long since we’ve pulled a real Pasta et Al move! I’ve always wanted to put American mustard inside pasta, and I love any opportunity to provoke purists, so this week we are taking the flavours of the ubiquitously fantastic cheeseburger, and stuffing them into fagottini.

Our pasta is bobbing around in a tomato and bacon broth, with pickle juice stirred through. And our sesame seed dough is filled with a neat stack of American red cheddar, ketchup made from the strained broth tomatoes, mustard, and a mini beef hamburger patty containing the bacon from the broth.

Ciao! We’ve got a short and sweet one this week. We’ve finally turned our family-favourite spinach fettuccine gluten-free! Remember that, unlike glutinous dough, it won’t stretch well. It is squished together under pressure but will break if over-stressed, which could easily by my one-line biography.

It’s been a while since we tried out something a little different, so this week we’re taking a love of dumplings and colourful things, and mixing that with pasta in our Japanese-inspired pork, banana prawn, and shiso casoncelli. These are made with a matcha dough, served in a rib and red radish broth, and garnished with sour plum, puffed quinoa, and fried shiso leaves.

Guten Tag pasta pals! I am extremely excited to announce that Pasta et Al has been translated into German and is available now for pre-order, ahead of its release on 1 June! My sincere thanks to Gerstenberg Verlag for believing in us, and to Melanie Goldmann for the incredible work that has gone into the translation. I hope that our new audience enjoys reading it as much as we enjoyed making it. Preorder is currently available from Thalia Online and Amazon Germany.

It’s that time of the year again! Back in the early days of Pasta et Al, we began the tradition of dreaming up a special pasta dish for Mother’s Day. This time around we’ve made a dough of limoncello and toasted perilla seeds, and turned it into doppio ravioli and agnolotti, filled with caramelised fig and mascarpone, goat cheese, and walnut. For a bit of fun, our agnolotti are nested inside the giant doppio ravs, in a delicious brown butter of walnut, limoncello, and apple cider vinegar, served with pomegranate molasses, freeze-dried blueberries, pink peppercorns, and a few edible flowers.

You’d know by now that Pasta et Al is all about mindful food. We source locally and seasonally, and buy all things grass-fed, free-range, unpackaged, and covered in soil. And when we’re not making pasta, we grow things, ferment things, jar things, and spend a lot of our time talking about things like permaculture, aquaponics, silvopasture, microbiomes, and regenerative agriculture. We’re a little bunch of passionate food-loving nerds, and this week we’re delighted to introduce our equally passionate regen ag friends at Dirty Clean Food.

After a lengthy cookbook-related creative hiatus, I’m so excited to share with you one of our most delicious recipes yet. South America has always been one of Pasta et Al’s most enthusiastic audiences, and this dish is built on the flavours of the Argentinian locro, a hearty stew of meat and vegetables. We’ve combined these elements with our unbeatable bone broth, producing a clear stock of beef, chorizo, butternut pumpkin, and baby corn. After straining, those ingredients are combined with a punchy chimichurri, forming the filling for our tortellini. Finally, our pasta dough is made in two parts, one with floral pink peppercorns, and the other with classic, warming black peppercorns.

Tabasco! It’s probably our family’s most regularly consumed condiment, and one that Little Al has recently become obsessed with. Al’s favourite is Chipotle, but we’ve gone with the classic Red Pepper for this week’s pasta. Its earthy, spicy, familiar smell somehow reminds me of my mum taking me on our regular rounds of the imported food stores when I was a kid. So, all things considered, it’s past time that we stuck it in some pasta dough.

Working on our book over this last year or so, I’ve focused on pairing more complicated pasta with simpler sauces, and vice versa. It just allows you to save a little time on one element, and use that to create something special with another.

So the dough and pasta is the focus here, although the confit purée is deceptively impressive for its simplicity – you certainly don’t have to sacrifice flavour to save time! This is our Striped Ricotta Fagottini with Garlic and Fennel Confit Purée.

This week’s pasta is a quick little dish built on pantry staples. We’ve mixed our pasta dough up with a hit of smoked paprika, turning the typically green foglie d’ulivo into a more autumnal colour (for our northern hemisphere friends). They’re served in a warming but understated brown butter sauce flavoured with garlic, saffron, fennel, pepper berries, and rosemary. One of the easiest doughs to make, turned into a forgivingly rustic pasta shape, served in the easiest of sauces.