The Sausage Pasta I Make More Than Any Other

Today we're gonna make creamy Italian sausage pasta. This recipe is so good and it is very easy to make and does not take a lot of time. We're gonna go into the ingredients right now. We have one pound of sweet Italian sausage. So this has fennel in it. You can use any Italian sausage you want here. You can use spicy if you desire. If that's the case, just remove the half teaspoon of crushed red pepper flakes. But I do prefer just a mild sausage for this one. I have one medium onion that I diced. I have five cloves of garlic that are sliced. Three quarter cup of dry white wine. Three quarter cup of Pecorino Romano. That's about 70 grams. I have one cup of heavy cream. I have about a third of a cup of tomato paste here, which is about 80 grams worth. I have one pound, actually this is a 500 gram bag of Pappardelle. So it's 17.6 ounces, a little bit more than a pound. And then I have one 28 ounce can of plum tomatoes. The print recipe, and you should always use our print recipes. You can get them. I always link them and I always put them in the pinned comment so you can like print it and then follow along with the recipe. That says 14 ounces of plum tomatoes, which would be a half a can. I'm just going to size up here. It's better to have a little bit more sauce than you need. Plus we have more than a pound of pasta here. I have fresh basil that will be used to finish it. And Tara just pointed out to me, because she just looked at the video. I made this video about six years ago and it's a horrible, horrible video, but it is still up on YouTube if you want to watch it. So many of you have told me to redo those older videos. And today we are redoing one of those older videos because this one is, though it's an oldie, it is really good. Okay, one ingredient I'm going to show you is olive oil. We're going to need that. I have a five quart, this is like a T-fal nonstick high walled pan. This will be large enough to hold our sauce and the pasta. I'm going to heat it to a little bit higher than medium. I'll use a couple of tablespoons of olive oil. We're going to have a good amount of sausage, good amount of sausage. We're going to have a good amount of fat in the sausage. All right, so my oil is nice and hot. You can see a little smoke coming from it. Pan is shimmering. I'm just going to put all the sausage down. I'm just going to spread it out so it gets kind of even contact in the pan. Now I took this bulk sausage out of casing so you could probably tell. No issue with that, because you might have to do that if you can't buy a bulk Italian sausage. And I just want to brown both sides. We'll cook it mostly through and then we'll do our onions. All right, it's been going for a few minutes. Just kind of flip it over, hit up the other side, then we can break it up. It's going to be hard for me to break this up. It's like kind of tight, I can tell because it was in the casing. I'm just going to move it right off to the side here. And then I'm just going to take my meat masher and just break it up as best I can. I want to get the pieces fairly small here. Just be too much downward pressure on this burner if I was going to just put a lot of force into it. If you don't have one of these, you can just put it in a plate, let it cool for a bit, get it on a cutting board, just chop it up. I want the sausage to be fairly small pieces when we're making the sauce so everything will be evenly distributed. All right, so I broke it all up, got a good amount of browning on it, and the pieces are small enough. So I'm going to add in the onion. So I turned the heat down to about medium here, maybe a touch lower than medium. And I want the onion to cook in with the sausage. You can take the sausage out of the pan if you want to and just add it back in, but sausage will be all right. Ton of fat in there, it'll be fine. And we're going to let everything meld and we'll let these onions get soft for about five, seven minutes. And I add a touch more oil. Depending on the sausage you buy, some will have more fat than others. This recipe is very similar to pasta norcina. If you've been watching this channel for a while, you probably have seen that one. That was a popular video for us. That recipe is in the cookbook along with a bunch of other recipes that use Italian sausage. This recipe is not in the cookbook. You can buy the cookbook here or here if you want. We appreciate you buying it. It really helps the channel a ton. We don't run sponsors on this channel ever, okay? I think the last sponsor we ever did was about three years ago. What I mean by a sponsor is a video that you're watching where somebody talks about a product for a minute and then they tell you to buy it and they're getting paid by that company. The random ads you see in the video are not, that's not what I'm talking about. We made a decision a while back, three years back to stop doing those. I felt that it was a good decision. All right, we're gonna let this keep going. All right, that's been about three minutes. I wanna let these onions go for another three minutes or so. I don't wanna put color on them, but I wanna get them soft. I want them to meld with the sausage. Because this is a fairly quick recipe, we're not cooking, like a ragu would be two hours, three hours or whatnot. This is like kind of, you can call it like a creamy sausage ragu, but it's more like a creamy sausage sauce. At this point, you can get your water to boil. We're not gonna cook the pasta yet. We always want the sauce waiting for the pasta, not the other way around. What I mean by that is you don't wanna have pasta draining in a colander, getting all clumpy together, waiting for your sauce to finish. But you can get your salted water to boil right now. All right, so it's been about six minutes. The onions are looking good. This is the five cloves of garlic, four cloves of garlic that are sliced around there. Okay, we're gonna let that get nice and fragrant in here, cook for a couple minutes. All right, so that garlic is nice in there. Everything is combined. This is that half a teaspoon of crushed red pepper flakes. If you don't like any hot pepper, just don't use it. And I'm just gonna let it cook in here for about 30 seconds just to kind of bloom in there. And then now I have the tomato paste. So about three ounces, about 80 grams worth, about half a can. So standard US can is always gonna be six ounces. So you need half a can here. And I'm just gonna let this cook in there. What you can do, and I'm gonna do this, you can just put a touch of water in there, just a tiny, tiny bit, maybe a little bit more. That's gonna allow me to fry this a little bit easier without burning it. I wanna fry this paste. I wanna take the tinniness out of it, mellow it, combine with everything. This is a short sauce. Like if I was gonna make, say I was making a ragu, I wouldn't really have to do that because it would be simmering for three hours. It wouldn't matter. But we're essentially only like 15 minutes from the dish being done. All right, we'll let that keep going. Kind of like hitting the bottom of that pan there. Let it go for about five minutes. All right, so it's been about five minutes and I have 3 1⁄4 cup of dry white wine. Just turn the heat up to pretty much high. And we're gonna reduce this by about a little bit. We're gonna let this cook in here, bring it to a boil for about a minute. So if you were using a stainless pan here or anything that had a lot of brown bits on the bottom, just take your flat-edged wooden spoon and just remove everything, okay? You're just deglazing everything. But with a pan like this, it's gonna come off immediately. And these are my plum tomatoes. I already used it. I already used an immersion blender for a second. I just like to like, the crushed tomatoes, the texture, I always like to just blend or pulse them just a touch. But you don't have to, it's totally up to you. And that's perfect, that's what I want. Most of that is evaporated, really absorbed into the sausage. And there are our tomatoes. All right, we're gonna let this come to a lively simmer. At this point, you can start boiling your pappardelle. If you don't have that, you can use rigatoni for this. Fettuccine would be good, penne. Any substantial pasta would be really good for this. All right, so it's coming up. It's gonna start splattering all over the place. Just gonna put my lid just cracked so I still get some evaporation from it just so it doesn't splatter all over the place. After it goes for a couple minutes, we're just gonna lower this to a simmer. And I am starting to boil the pasta now. Wanna cook it to one minute less than al dente. We're gonna finish it in the sauce. So I had this on a low simmer and my pasta's about five minutes from being one minute less than al dente. So what we can do here right now is we can just give this a taste. We'll add salt and pepper if we need to. Tastes great. Maybe a touch of salt. No pepper needed. Everything here is based on the sausage. So the better that you can buy, it's really gonna add just a ton of flavor to your sauce. If it's not the most flavorful, maybe you'll have to kick everything up a little bit with some more seasoning. What I'm gonna do here is just add in that cup of cream. And it's 240 mLs. You don't want cream in here. You can just omit it and you'll just have a sausage sauce. This is gonna blend in. It's gonna turn it into a pink sausage cream sauce. And that's just heavy cream. I don't mess around with half and half or anything like that. If you do half and half or you do milk, you're gonna have to temper things. So what that means is you will take some of this sauce out, put it in there, and you're gonna add a little bit of your half and half or milk at a time so it doesn't curdle. But heavy cream, because of the fat content in it, it's never gonna curdle on you. I suppose you could do an experiment where you try to get it to curdle, but I think it would be very difficult. I'm gonna turn the heat up a little bit more. So I just took my pasta off. It's sitting right here. What I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna remove a little bit of this sauce here. We might have a little too much. Like I said, the recipe called for 14 ounces of the plum tomato for one pound of pasta. I have a little bit more pasta, but not much. So there's nothing wrong with doing this because we can always just add more in. We can add it right back in. I'm gonna turn my heat up to about medium. And my pasta definitely is not done yet. It needs a little bit more time. Don't worry about pulling it wet. You're fine. It's fairly thick sauce here. If you do drain from your colander, just save a little bit of pasta water. Always do that. All right, so we're gonna sauce this up. And we wanna marry the pasta with our sausage cream sauce. Since the pasta is a little bit not al dente yet, okay, it's a little hard, we'll just check it as we go here. We don't wanna overcook it, but we definitely wanna marry this. If you were cooking for one person, you're running a restaurant, you have a pan, and then you would just be flipping to do it. But when you're cooking for a bunch, you're gonna have a larger pan like I do. You're not really gonna be able to flip this here. You can if you want, but you're gonna make a mess. You're gonna make a mess even if you're not flipping it. I've already made a mess. This looks phenomenal. Smells amazing. I really don't care about the sauce. I know it tastes good. I wanna just be able to taste the pasta. That's pretty good. Gonna pull that off the heat, turn off the heat. So we got enough here, and that's exactly why I had that recipe saying the 14 ounces, maybe just a touch more, but we'll have more on the side. 3 1⁄4 cup Pecorino Romano. It's gonna tighten up everything here. It's gonna add a great flavor to it. If you don't wanna use Pecorino, you can use Parmesan cheese too. I'm partial to Pecorino for almost every recipe because it's better. Just is. Disagree. Just is. Disagree. Just is. It's very Southern Italian. I prefer Parmigiano-Reggiano. I know you do. And I think people who've been watching this channel long enough know you do as well. All right. It's gonna add a nice salty bite there to it. I'm just gonna test that sauce. Mm. All right. So all I would do here is just use some basil. Just pulling some off stem. You can leave the leaves whole if you want, or you can just hand tear them. That's what I'm gonna do. Tara, do you think this is a better performance than that video from six years ago? Definitely. You look a lot better now too. What do you mean I look better? You aged like fine wine. I aged like fine wine? My beard was completely black six years ago. Now I'm fully gray. A man bun or a ponytail. Yeah, if you wanna see me in a ponytail, go back and watch that video. I'm not taking it down. I don't take down videos anymore. I just leave them up. All right. We're gonna see what the taste tester thinks in a second. James. How's it going? I'm good. What'd you do today? Like nothing. Nothing? Yeah. I mean, I'm packed for school. School starts when? Tomorrow. Yup. I'm like struggling. I would just poke it. Or do that. If I wasn't on camera, I would just slurp it. I'm really liking this. I'll stop right here actually. Because I want to eat this off camera. You got another taste test after this. Yeah. All right. So what do you think? Like what does it need? Is it good? It's a sausage cream sauce. I don't think it really needs much. Any more herbs? I just put a little bit of basil in there. I think it's fine. Like just how it is honestly. I think it's really good actually. Like I actually like it more than bolognese to be honest. It's a lot quicker. Yeah. I think I'm gonna give it a 10. All right. Yeah. Definitely like, it's definitely like one of the better meat sauce pastas. You know? Very simple to make, quick. Something that you can do James, that you could cook for me and mama. Yeah. I have made this before. Yeah. You made something similar. Yeah. I just made it with fettuccine, which was also really good. I think any like, like flat shaped pastas are like good for this. You can even use like rigatoni with it. Maybe just don't use spaghetti. Yeah. I would stay away from spaghetti with heavy, like a really heavy sauce. You know your stuff. Yeah. I think fettuccine is the best for this. Yep. Fettuccine, tagliatelle or pappardelle. Yeah. Yep. All right. James, I will take a 10. Thank you. And you got another dish coming up next. I made a chicken stew. That's the first video I made today. So he's got to eat that one too. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.