As the weather gets crisper, I develop a Seasonal Affective Craving for rib-sticking starch-on-starch dishes: Rice and beans. Beans and bread crumbs. Pizza and potatoes (delicious with pesto and roasted garlic). And pasta and beans.
The most well-known pasta and bean dish is probably pasta e fagioli — or as Italian-Americans call it, pasta fazool, a dish so famous that it gets name-checked by the great Dean Martin (“when the stars make you drool/Just like a pasta fazool/that’s amore”).
Pasta e fagioli is usually a thick minestrone — like soup in a tomato sauce, but I’ve also had versions that emphasize the pasta, eliminate the tomato, and use the beans as a garnish and their cooking liquid as the thickener for the sauce.
When Radda opened in Boulder a few years ago, they had a great pasta dish on their menu that kept me and wife coming back: Garganelle — a dried pasta shaped like penne but with a toothsome pleat in the middle — with house-made pork sausage, kale and white beans. The dish, which used Delverde pasta, a superb Italian dried pasta made from durum wheat and mountain spring water, was both clean-tasting and hearty and probably inspired our interpretation of pasta e fagioli, which combines pork sausage, radicchio di treviso and canned Italian white beans.
Radicchio di treviso, which is shaped like Belgian endive, has a meatier texture and more complex flavor than the better-known, bulb-shaped radicchio di chiogga, and is, in my opinion, tastier cooked than raw.
This dish uses a good amount of sliced caramelized garlic and browned fennel sausage as well as chili flakes, parmesan and olive oil.
John Broening cooks at Duo Restaurant, .
Garganelle With Italian Sausage, Treviso and White Beans
No treviso? Substitute 1 medium radicchio. Whole Foods sells Delverde pasta. Serves 4.
Ingredients
1 pound garganelle
4 tablespoons olive oil
6 ounces Italian sausage, removed from casing and crumbled
6 cloves garlic, sliced
2 heads treviso, sliced horizontally into 1-inch pieces
1 cup canned navy or cannelini beans with their liquid
Pinch chili flakes
Freshly grated parmesan cheese to taste
Salt and freshly ground pepper
Directions
Bring a large pot of heavily salted water to a boil. Add the pasta, stir well, cover and return to a boil.
In a large saute pan, brown the sausage in a teaspoon of the oil. Remove and set aside.
Drain most of the fat from the pan, set over medium-low heat and add the sliced garlic. Slowly caramelize, and then add the treviso. Cook until slightly tender and colored, about 5 minutes. Add the beans, the sausage and a pinch of chili flakes.
Drain the pasta. Toss in the pan with the sausage mixture and the remaining olive oil. Season with salt and pepper. Grate the cheese over the pasta and serve immediately.
