Speckled Pasta with Tomato and Anchovies Sauce

All you Youvegotmeal fans out there (insert the sound of nobody here) know that we love making honemade pasta and prefer using it over bought pasta. Even so, sometimes we feel the need to mix things up, bring a little bit of color even to a classic like homemade pasta. So we decided to make what is called speckled pasta, which means that we added finely chopped herbs (in this case we used exclusively parsley) in the dough composition. And, to give the recipe a nice little kick, we also added 5 roasted chilies and 2 fresh ones.

First, roast your spicy peppers and remove the seeds. Use a food processor to blitz them into a paste. You can either put the fresh chilies with the roasted ones in the processor or you can finely chop it by hand. I used a mortar and pestle to turn the roasted chilies into a paste. Next, for the parsley, pick the leaves only and chop it really fine.

Then we made the dough, using 250 grams of white flour, 2 eggs and 1 egg yolk, the chilies and parsley. Put the flour in large, tall pan, make a hole in the middle and place the eggs in there. Wisk the eggs well, the add the chili paste and herbs on top. Use your hands to mix everything together, until you can form a ball of dough that you will need to knead for around 10 minutes. After this, rest the pasta dough in the fridge, completely covered in cling film for at least 30 minutes.

A couple of things should be mentioned about this kind of pasta making. There are actually 2 ways of creating it involved here: one by putting in the finely chopped herb (think also basil, rosemary, thyme, marjoram, oregano) and another one that actually colors the pasta (in this case using a large enough quantity of roasted pepper paste – say 100 grams, partially drained of water, would have made the pasta turn a red –orange color).

Also consider the fact that when mixing greens or vegetables in the pasta dough you will have to adjust the quantity of flour you mix in it, in order to compensate for additional moisture. Also, you will lose elasticity in the pasta by adding the herbs or color turning ingredients. As for the shape, in this recipe we opted for tagliatelle.

The sauce: 300 grams of whole and halved cherry tomatoes, 200 grams of fresh tomato juice, 6-7 anchovies fillets, 3-4 cloves of garlic, diced, 2-3 tbs. of drained capers, salt, pepper, olive oil. Start of by heating up the oil and cooking the garlic for around 30 sec. Add the capers and anchovies and cook until the fish melts in the oil. Add the cherry tomatoes and the juice, reduce heat to a medium and simmer for 5-8 minutes. Feel free to  sprinkle some additional parsley on top, but I felt like the one in the pasta dough was enough.

Enjoy,