Simple food made using the best ingredients
You can’t go wrong with this Italian sausage & peas with taglierini.
PREP TIME: 10 mins
COOKING TIME: 30 mins
DIFFICULTY: easy
IDEAL FOR: crowd-pleaser, family, midweek meal
BUDGET: £
Wine pairing: This is a fantastic dish that has both the lightness of the green peas with the meatier Italian sausage.
So, try a nice rose from Michael Sutton’s Cellar
And enjoy the best of both worlds while you dine al fresco with this dish.
Italian sausage & peas with taglierini
This is another fantastic dish from Theo Randall (The Italian Deli Cookbook).
It once again shows me that simple food made with the best ingredients is all you need for a tasty meal.
You don’t need to fuss or add a million pinches of this or that.
Or soak things for 5 days while turning it over every 4hrs.
This is a very simple, very tasty and very quick dish to whip up.
Which will wow your family and friends.
3 main ingredients
- Italian sausage
- Frozen peas
- Taglierini (pronounced tah-lyeh-REE-nee) – sometimes called tagliolini
Ok, so the frozen peas are by far the easiest to pick up.
We’ve always got frozen peas in our freezer.
But I’ll honest, the Italian sausage and taglierini pasta is a bit trickier.
So, I’d advise you go online to this Italian shop
And you’ll find both the pasta and Italian sausages.
But if that’s a faff.
Then, your butcher will usually have some form of Italian sausage (they are coarser & meatier).
And you can easily substitute taglierini with tagliatelle or fettuccine.
But I have to say, the super thin ‘birds nest’ taglierini really make the dish light and lush.
Tagliatelle vs. tagliolini
Pasta shapes and sizes… what a minefield!
Tagliatelle and tagliolini are Italian egg pastas.
The difference is that tagliatelle has a flat, wide shape, and is best with heavy and meaty sauces.
Tagliolini has a thin, cylindrical shape, and is best with thin and light sauces.
But, both pastas are actually quite versatile and can work well with many sauces.
Tagliatelle came from Emilia-Romagna and Marche – the same area that now produce Grana Padano cheese.
Tagliolini is a traditional recipe from the Liguria region – more specifically, Piedmont and Molise.
Frozen peas – my emergency go-to
I love frozen peas.
They always manage to save me from a Monday-night-no-food-in-the-house disaster.
And this dish is another one of those great quick meals using frozen peas.
Also, an aside… a slight variation on this recipe, is another favourite I whip up.
Which uses frozen peas, lardons (or bacon), chilli flakes and pasta – delicious.
Birdseye
Clarence Birdseye: Father of Frozen Food
We have been freezing foods since as early as 1000 B.C.
When the Chinese stored goods in ice cellars.
But Clarence Birdseye, the man responsible for Birds Eye frozen foods, revolutionised the frozen food industry.
He was the man who figured out the logistics of selling frozen foods.
How:
- could he freeze it fast so it didn’t deform the food tissue?
- would he package it?
- would he transport the product?
Birdseye often froze his catch after a day of fishing to keep it fresh.
Which he learned from the Inuit, who would fish from holes in the ice and let it freeze instantly in the icy temperatures.
He quickly worked out, that the key to good frozen food, was to freeze it quickly.
But it wasn’t until 1927 that Birdseye patented a freezing machine.
And there was no going back.
The company advertised frozen peas “as gloriously green as any you will see next summer.”
Italian sausage & peas with taglierini
As mentioned, this recipe is from one of my fave cookbooks, The Italian Deli.
But the recipe itself, apparently comes from a restaurant called Groto de Corgnan.
It’s near Verona, in Sant’Ambrogio di Valpolicella, in the heart of the wine region.
But now, we can all enjoy it in our own kitchens.
What’s your favourite pasta dish? Leave a comment…
Italian sausage & peas with tagliarini
Ingredients
- 500 g Italian sausages, skinned and chopped see blog for online source to buy from – or alternatively your butcher will have a version of these
- 1 tbsp olive oil
- 1 shallot or small onion, peeled and finely chopped
- 1 cup water
- 250 g frozen peas
- sea salt and pepper for seasoning
- 500 g taglierini see blog for online source to buy from – or alternatively use tagletelli or fettucine
- 75 g unsalted butter
- Parmesan, finely grated, to serve
Instructions
- On a high heat, place a large pan and add the pieces of sausagemeat. Fry for about 10 mins, until the fat has rendered out and the meat has browned. Once done, transfer the meat to a plate and set to one side.
- In the same pan, stir in the olive oil and add the shallot/onion and reduce the heat to medium. Cook for approx 3 mins or until soft.Then add the frozen peas and a cup of water, cover with a lid and cook for approx. 5 mins until the peas are tender.
- Remove the lid, and return the cooked sausagemeat, stir in and cook for another five mins. Add seasoning and turn off the heat.
- Next, bring to the boil a large pan of salted water and add the tagliarini and cook for about 3 mins, or until tender.Then transfer the pasta to the sausagemeat pan and add a ladleful of the pasta cooking water. Stir in the butter, and put the pan on a medium heat and cook, tossing, until the liquid in the pan has gone syrupy and emulsified. Serve wiht some sprinkled with parmesan and black pepper.
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