pici all'Etrusca
pici all'Etrusca
'Etruscan' Pici aren't particularly well known outside Tuscany. The classic version of the recipe (see the gallery) combines boiled eggs and an usual mix of herbs, garlic and oil to create an unusual pasta - part pesto, part oil-based sauce with the opulence of a carbonara, you've never eaten a pasta like All'Etrusca.
And the beauty of Etruscan is that you can use it as a base sauce for other ingredients - add un-dried tomatoes, guanciale, bacon, squid, prawns or flaked fish for a really unforgettable dish.
I've chosen Pasta Morelli's Pici Dritti (which you'll find on the Fratelli Camisa site)
- similar to traditional Tuscan Pici, but with a cunning feature that almost halves the boiling time. Some traditional dried pici can take almost 20 minutes to boil, but Morelli have included a bucatini-like hole down the middle which brings the cooking time down to around 11 minutes, which is quite similar to many thinner long pasta shapes.
Morelli say the hole in their pici is designed to close as the pasta cooks and swells, which means that they 'eat' almost exactly like classic pici.
Pici all'Etrusca seem to work particularly well as a summer dish. If you swap the pici for a short shape like orecchiette or casarecce it's a great chilled pasta dish too.
WHAT YOU'LL NEED TO DO
(scroll down for the full method)
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boil the eggs, cool
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chop the herbs and garlic
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make the sauce
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boil the pasta
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combine and serve or chill
pici all'Etrusca with sun-dried tomatoes
FOR FOUR PEOPLE
INGREDIENTS
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a large handful basil
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a large handful parsley
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3-4 leaves fresh mint
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2-3 small cloves garlic / to taste
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2 tablespoons sun-dried tomatoes
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1 egg per person
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6-8 tblspns EVO
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100g pecorino / to taste
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To serve: black/pink pepper,
PASTA
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400g dry pici
MANTECATURA
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none
METHOD
Begin by hard-boiling 1 egg per person. Remove the shells and allow them to cool completely. When they’re cold, hold remove the yolks and set them aside. Break up the whites, using a fork. Crush the garlic and set aside.
In a similar way to making a pesto, use a blender to pulse blend about half all the ingredients. Keep tasting as you blend and don’t spare the oil - you need to arrive at a pretty liquid, oily mix as the egg will tend to dry things up. Add one of the yolks just before you stop blending. Taste again and adjust salt / pepper, then set the pesto aside.
Boil the pasta and combine it with the pesto, without using any pasta water. If your combined pasta is too dry, add a drizzle of EVO. This is quite an oily, not a starchy sauce.
Crumble egg yolk on each portion, together with small slivers of sliced sun-dried tomatoes (or any meat/fish of your choice), pecorino, and more black or pink pepper.