Bigoi in salsa

Yes, I am back and back to cooking after few weeks of no cooking at all… almost unbelievable! I can’t live without cooking…

I imagine you are wondering what bigoi in salsa are.

But, please, be careful with this dish… not everyone likes it.

Before we move on, some explanation about the two words of the title is required.

Bigoi o bigoli are a kind of handmade thick spaghetti made in the Northeast of Italy. They are shaped using a torchio, a hand crank pasta press, or pasta extruder, and depending on the type of die you use you can make different shapes of pasta (if you find the die for making gargati, please let me know). On the historical side, Thomas Jefferson, among other things, brought drawings of torchio for pasta after touring northern Italy in 1787. I will leave aside the recipe to prepare the bigoi dough for another time. As for now, you can use any king of thick spaghetti, bucatini, or even some nicely thick fettuccine, as long as you are using egg pasta.

Salsa, no, no, no! It has nothing to do with the tomato based Mexican salsa, nor with the dance.

Salsa is a typical Venetian sauce (this is what salsa means in Venice) than can is in different recipes. It is a very simple, very poor and very local preparation. Most importantly it has such a distinctive flavor that either you like it or you hate it. I simply love it!

The ingredients for the original recipe are one onion (white onion, please), one garlic clove, extra virgin olive oil, anchovies (either fresh or the salted ones). Simple, aren’t they?!

And the preparation is even simpler. Slice very thin the onion and the garlic and let them stew in some olive oil and a splash of water. You don’t have to brown the onion, it has to remain white. At this point let’s take the anchovies: if they are fresh, just peel and debone them. If they are salted, wash away the salt, and if they are salted and in olive oil, try to get rid of the oil as much as possible. You add the anchovies to the onion. Stew the sauce for five minutes or less on a very mild flame and, before the five minutes are over, add half a glass of white wine. Once the wine has evaporated, it’s ready to go. Cook you pasta al dente and pour the sauce on your pasta. Mix it and… buon appetito.

The most important thing is to realize that it tastes just like Venice.

Hope you like it! If you don’t, I understand, don’t worry.