spaghetti all'amatriciana

Traditionally an ‘amatriciana’ sauce is supposed to be served with spaghetti, but you’ll often see baccatini or thicker spaghetti, like the spaghettoni I used in this recipe.

The ‘classic’ recipe is just a tomato sauce and guanciale - but as I find that a little dull and super fatty, I prefer to add a tiny amount of garlic to the tomatoes and use smoked bacon (see the header image) instead of the blobs of lard you get with guanciale. Something of a compromise is to use pancetta, and in fact the second photo on this page is an Amatriciana made with diced smoked pancetta.

But let's back-track a bit.

Amatriciana has been firmly within the orbit of 'purist' staples for many years now - extremely established and well known recipes that have 'coalesced' to fewer and fewer and rigorously defended core ingredients. Carbonara is another recipe that falls into the same bracket.

With Amatriciana, the purists tend to oppose any addition to the tomato sauce like garlic or, especially, onion. Funnily enough though, as Luca Cesare notes in 'A Brief History of Pasta', onion was once the only common denominator in early published recipes of this dish - but for some reason it seems to have fallen very out of fashion. Maybe they just don't like onions in Amatrice.

The other debated ingredient is sometimes pig - and whether it's possible to use pancetta instead of the latter-day purists' guanciale, or even bacon if you're unable to find either pancetta or guanciale.

I've cooked Amatriciana many times and with and without onion and garlic and using guanciale, bacon and pancetta. I encourage you to experiment and find your favourite combination; my own is just a little hint of garlic with a mix of smoked bacon AND pancetta.