Love and fighting. That is good, what you said Pablo. Love and fighting, and a little wine. Then you are always young, always happy.
- Pilon, in Tortilla Flat, written by John Steinbeck
Heyo!
I posted that quote from Tortilla Flat because I’ve been feeling it in my life lately—a lot of love, a lot of fighting, and a little wine. Though Tortilla Flat is about a group of misguided friends getting drunk and causing mischief, I actually think this quote is 100% sustainable. Live with excitement, live with feeling, and maybe even a little chaos, too.
These days, though, I’ve got enough chaos. What I need is calm, and that starts at home here in Detroit. This is a fun town, but there’s a serenity to it that my life’s been missing. I feel at ease here in the D, so no matter what’s going on in my personal or professional life, I’m able to stay grounded.
Compare that to Los Angeles, which is an exciting city, but also suffocating. Maybe that’s why I stayed there so long—I like to be choked a little bit.
One of my favorite pasta dishes is amatriciana. It’s an easy tomato sauce made with rendered pork jowl, tomatoes, and Pecorino Romano. Chili flakes are usually included, too. White wine and onions are optional, but also constants—you’ll see plenty of recipes enlisting the services of one or the other. One thing I really enjoy about Italian cooking is that despite so few instructions, nobody can really agree on a singular set of ingredients. In the recipe below, all that infighting is used to its advantage. Use it all, I say: Onions, white wine, guanciale, chili flakes, pecorino, tomatoes, and even a little olive oil.
Traditionally, amatriciana is tossed with bucatini, but here’s a hot take for you—bucatini is shit.
I would wager that amatriciana is the only acceptable use for bucatini, and even then, it’s just not necessary. Remember when Bon Appétit shoved bucatini in our collective faces and told us to like it? It really was the it pasta for bougie white folks for a while, capped by Allison Roman doing some friendly PR for it. But friends, bucatini is lower tier pasta. Don’t even bother with it.
Ask yourself, what can bucatini do that chitarra cut spaghetti can’t? Thick, tubular spaghetti like bucatini or perciatelli is too airy. It lacks that singular, iconic chew which spaghetti produces. I feel that bucatini has too much chew; it’s too slippery to twirl properly, so much so that it’s almost difficult to eat. Sauce doesn’t cling or infiltrate a bucatini noodle like spaghetti. Also, good luck finding bucatini on store shelves—it’s fairly non-existent unless you’re getting it online.
Meanwhile, spaghetti remains perfect—accessible, delicious, and utilitarian. Whenever I see somebody hate on spaghetti like Dan Pashman, I get red hot with Italian-American anger. Why are we overthinking a classic? Spaghetti is perfectly twirl-able, chewy, and swells with delicious flavor when cooked in sauce. There’s a reason it continues to be the pasta of choice for Roman classics like carbonara and cacio e pepe. There’s a reason it’s the gateway pasta for your children. Spaghetti rocks. And it’s what you should use for your amatriciana, too.
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