Recipes
Spaghetti all’assassina
Few simple ingredients for a truly tasty first course: here's how to make spaghetti all'assassina, a recipe not to be missed.
Spaghetti all'assassina is a typical first course from the city of Bari based on tomato and spicy chilli pepper. According to Felice Giovine, a great expert in the Apulian gastronomic tradition , the origins of this dish date back to the 1960s and it is important not to consider this recipe only as a recovery dish.
With its simplicity, this first course rightfully enters the recipes to keep in mind for when you have little time to cook. Since the spaghetti must be cooked directly in the pan with the tomato and chilli sauce, it is a sort of reinterpretation of risotto pasta. At the end of cooking, the spaghetti must be toasted in a pan so as to make them slightly crunchy and this is their absolute peculiarity. Have you already put on the water?
Preparation
Spaghetti all'assassina
First prepare the tomato broth by pouring water , puree and double concentrate into a pan. Season with salt and bring to the boil.
Pour a drizzle of olive oil into a pan, add the peeled garlic cloves and the cleaned chilli pepper cut into thin pieces.
Place the pan on the heat and fry the garlic and chilli over a low heat. As soon as the garlic clove is sufficiently golden, add the tomato puree but be careful because it will tend to splatter.
Spread the spaghetti directly on the sauce using a kitchen fork and wait until some begin to brown. Only at this point can you add two ladles of tomato broth . Proceed in this way until the pasta is cooked: broth, dry bottom and burnt spaghetti, raising the crispy ones from time to time. It will take about 10 minutes.
Once cooked, let any remaining liquid dry and distribute on plates.
Here is a video with all the steps to make this dish, simple in terms of ingredients but particular in terms of consistency.
Advice
There are some precautions to implement for a perfect success of the dish. Firstly the pan should be made of blue iron so that it allows the pasta to stick and burn. For a perfect consistency, the Academy recommends using a paste with little starch, preferably not bronze drawn.
Regarding preparation, there are different schools of thought. There are those who blanch the pasta first but in this case the final consistency of the spaghetti will change and it will no longer be risottoed . There are those who then put all the sauce directly into the pan, then adding only water during cooking. The technique we have proposed is the one that allows you to obtain a greater concentration of flavours.
Finally, a clarification: it seems that in the original recipe the sauce was based on peeled tomatoes broken by hand. To correct the acidity of the tomato, the use of a teaspoon of sugar or bicarbonate is permitted.
Conservation
If you don't finish it right away, you can store it in the fridge in a container for a couple of days .
Origin and history
Pasta all'assassina was born in a restaurant in the center of Bari, Al Sorso Lavorato , in 1967 at the hands of chef Enzo Francavilla . Two Neapolitan customers commissioned him to do something tasty and different from the usual, so the chef decided to please them by creating a decidedly spicy dish that made the two customers exclaim "you're a murderer!" hence the origin of the name.
Despite the fame it enjoys today, the dish soon fell into oblivion, making a comeback in 2021 thanks to an episode of the Lolita Lobosco drama. Taken from the novel of the same name "Spaghetti all'assassina" by Gabriella Genisi, it effectively enters popular culture to the point that the Accademia dell'Assassina was founded on social media.
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