Rigatoni with Sausage and Fresh Mozzarella Recipe

Last night my wife took my youngest to knitting class so my 11 year old and I decided to prepare a delicious pasta dinner together. I didn’t want to go to the grocery store and wanted to finish up some leftovers like the link of cooked Italian sweet sausage from Sunday and that 1/2 egg of fresh mozzarella cheese.

We came up with this simple pasta dish on the fly.  In the time it took us to cook the pasta, we were able to prep and prepare a simply delicious sauce. My daughter picked out the mezzi rigatoni from the pantry but a penne pasta would have worked just as well. I wouldn’t use spaghetti or linguini for this dish because of the sauce.  Heartier pastas work well with heartier sauces, and this was definitely a hearty sauce.

Sausage - we used some leftover sausage that I pan roasted in our wood burning oven but I think you could use fresh sausage too. In fact, if I had not already cooked the sausage, I would have used fresh but removed it from the casing and browned it up a bit.

Brown Stock - brown stock, also called Glace de Viande, is a combination of beef and veal stock that is used by professional chefs for making soups, stews and sauces. It’s one of the first things culinary students learn to make in culinary school. I always have on hand a commercial brown stock reduction called Glace de Viande Gold that comes in a highly concentrated reduction. I used approximately 1/2 ounce of this product with 1/2 cup of pasta water but you could use a homemade or commercial beef stock or even chicken stock if that’s all you have in your pantry.

Mezzi Rigatoni - Mezzi means half-sized so mezzi rigatoni is a half-sized rigatoni pasta. Rigatoni, one of the most popular forms of pasta in Italy, is a tube shaped pasta, larger that penne but without the angled cut on the ends. The translation for riga is lined and rigati is translated as ridged so I guess you can say rigatoni is lined with ridges.

Ingredients

1/2 box (1/2 pound)  of mezzi rigatoni (or hearty pasta shape of your choice)
2 tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil
1 large shallot or 1 small onion
2 cloves of garlic
1 link of Italian sweet sausage (see note)
10 pitted kalamata olives
1/2 large egg fresh mozzarella
salt & pepper
1/2 cup brown stock - glace de viande

How to Prepare

Start by heating up a pot of salted water for the pasta. Be sure to check out my pasta cooking tips.  When the water is at a boil, add the pasta and cook until al dente.

Next, get all your ingredients ready. This is called mise en place. Start by finely chopping the shallot or onion, mincing the garlic, slicing the sausage and slicing the kalamata olives.  Cut the fresh mozzarella into small pieces.

Heat up a small sauce pan and when hot, add the olive oil. When the olive oil is hot but not smoking, add the onion and cook on medium-high heat for a couple of minutes.

Add the garlic, being careful not to let it burn. I will shake the pan or use a wooden spoon to prevent this from happening. I let that cook for about a minute and then added the cooked sausage and kalamata olives.

I let this cook for a minute or two and then add the beef or brown stock. Let this reduce by about half.  I also like to add a little of the water the pasta is cooking in because it has some starch in it from the pasta.  It doesn’t take much—maybe 1/4 to 1/2 cup. This starch combined with the cheese and olive oil will help form an emulsion to thicken the sauce and help make sure that the sauce sticks to the pasta. Taste the sauce, and season with salt and pepper.

When the pasta is perfectly cooked “to the tooth,” drain it and add it to a serving bowl. Add the cut up mozzarella cheese and then the sauce. The heat from the pasta and the sauce should melt the fresh mozzarella.

Serve immediately in warmed bowls.

My 11 year old daughter enjoyed this dish so much she went back for a fourth helping. Simple to prepare with ingredients we already had on hand.  I encourage you to look in your refrigerator, see what’s leftover, and make your own quick pasta sauce.

Related Posts

Kids Can Cook

How To Cook Pasta

Kids Can Cook Fettuccine with Simple Lobster Sauce

My nine year old helped me throw this one together. We had some cooked Maine lobsters leftover from the weekend and  wanted to use them in a dish everyone would eat. I was thinking Lobster Fra Diablo but wasn’t sure my girls would enjoy it so I came up with this simple alternative.

My nine year old Maddie has Cerebral Palsy so I try to find jobs she can handle safely and still feel like she is contributing. It’s not difficult at all. She helped me get ingredients from the refrigerator, grab the necessary cookware from the cabinets, cut herbs from the herb garden, pick lobster meat from the shells, stir the pasta and set the table. All I had to do was cut and cook.

If you want to read more about how teaching your kids to cook is a good thing, check out my blog series starting with Kids Can Cook. I also built a Squidoo lens on the same topic called Teaching Your Kids To Cook.

Fettuccine with Simple Lobster Sauce

Ingredients

3/4 pounds of fettuccine
1 medium onion, diced
3 cloves garlic, chopped fine
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 cups lobster stock*
2 cooked lobsters, meat from tail and legs removed and chopped into bite sized pieces
2 tablespoons fresh basil, finely chopped
2 tablespoons fresh parsley, finely chopped
2 tablespoons butter
salt and pepper, to taste

How to Make Fettuccine with Lobster Sauce

Start by bringing a big pot of water to boil. Add the pasta and cook until al dente.

Heat a medium sized saute (frying) pan until hot. Add oil and when it begins to shimmer, just before the smoking point, add the onions and cook for 3 minutes over medium high heat. Add the garlic and continue cooking until the onions become translucent. Do not let the garlic burn.

Add a quarter cup of the lobster stock to deglaze the pan. Add the lobster and the rest of the lobster stock. Continue cooking until the lobster stock is reduced by half or to your desired thickness.

Add the chopped basil and parsley. Mount the butter in pieces. Mounting is where you add butter to a sauce at the end to give it texture, flavor and a sheen. It is better to cut it up into smaller pieces and add one at a time while continuously stirring. You don’t want to add all the butter at once.

Taste the sauce and season with salt and pepper.

When the pasta is done, drain it and add it to the sauce, mix all together and serve.

*Lobster Stock - Not the easiest thing to find commercially and when in a hurry, not something you want to make. It is easy enough to make some decent stock with the shells and bodies of the lobster you are not using and here is a link to a lobster stock recipe but I used a product called Glace de Fruits de Mer Gold which is a fancy name for seafood stock but this stuff is more of a shellfish stock.  You can read more about it here at Lobster Stock.

Black and White Truffle Risotto

This risotto recipe is to announce my latest Squidoo lens called When Is A Truffle Not A Truffle. It looks at the differences between chocolate truffles and these intensely pungent "diamonds" from the ground. A lot of people ask me why they are both called truffles, how to make homemade chocolate truffles and how to cook with truffle mushrooms. My lens covers all this plus you’ll find a great video of hunting truffles in Siena and more.

Where To Find Fresh Black & White Truffles

Fresh truffles have a short season so you have to be careful when purchasing them. There are other truffle products (truffle oil, truffle butter, jarred truffles) you can substitute that have longer shelf lives and are a little easier on your wallet but if you are looking the intense flavor and incredible pungent aroma of fresh truffles, be sure to find a purveyor who specializes in them. One online company I like is the Gourmet Food Store. This web site not only offers truffle products but Foie Gras, Pate, Caviar and a whole bunch of gourmet products.

The flavor of black truffles in this dish is showcased, front and center. You can substitute some truffle oil, but for the most intense flavor, there is no substitute for the “real thing.”

Black and White Truffle risotto
Serves 4-6 people

1 tablespoon butter
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 shallot, minced
kosher salt, to taste
white pepper, to taste
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 cup arborio rice
1/4 cup dry white wine
5 cups chicken stock (or vegetable broth for a vegetarian version)
1 tablespoon minced black truffle (or 1 ½ tablespoons truffle oil)
2 tablespoons softened butter (omit if using truffle oil)
¼ cup Parmesan cheese
2 tablespoons chopped parsley
shaved white truffles for garnish

Bring stock to a boil, then turn off the heat.

Heat a sauté pan over medium heat until hot.
Add your butter and olive oil and heat until they start to shimmer.
Now add the minced shallot, garlic and dry rice. Cook and stir over medium heat until the garlic and shallot is tender and the rice is translucent around the edges, about 2 minutes.

Add a heavy pinch of salt, white pepper and white wine and cook until dry. I use white pepper only because it doesn’t stand out against the color of the white risotto. There is no flavor difference, just for appearances.

Add 1 cup of hot stock along with the minced truffles (or truffle oil) and stir frequently until the broth is absorbed and the rice is almost dry.
Continue adding 1 cup of broth at a time, cooking and stirring until most of the liquid is absorbed before adding the next cup. You may not have to add all of the last cup of broth.

The finished risotto should have the consistency of thick, not stodgy, oatmeal. The risotto should be creamy, but the rice should still have some texture. The rice should not be mushy. Total cooking time will be about 20-22 minutes.

Once the rice is at the proper texture, stir in the butter (if using) and parmesan cheese. Taste and add more salt or white pepper, if necessary.
Divide among plates. Garnish with one or two shavings of white truffle and a sprinkle of chopped parsley, and serve immediately.

Related Topics

When Is A Truffle Not A Truffle?

Chef Bertrand Chemel’s Ricotta Gnocchi

Wild Mushroom Risotto