Spaghetti alla Bottarga

Sardinia’s opal tinted waters that lap against the island’s crinkly coast are awash with bronzed Italian bodies and most excitingly, are wriggling with grey mullet. The history of Sardinia, the Mediterranean and these wriggling mullet is so intertwined that you could write a compelling anthropological thesis about their relationship that would reveal the island’s true character.

Sardinia’s location makes the island a sponge for outside influences. Over the centuries Sardinia has been invaded by the Vandals, the Byzantines, the Ostrogoths and the maritime republics of Genoa and Pisa as well as being inundated by Arab raids. It’s this influx of external influences that makes Sardinia’s food culture so interesting. A quick look at the culinary palimpsest shows what a strong influence Arab culture has had on Sardinia with the legacy of fregola and most interestingly, bottarga.

Bottarga (AKA Sardinian Caviar) is the preserved roe sac from grey mullet and tastes deeply savoury, super salty and very grown up. Just imagine a firmer, nuttier version of an anchovy. It is made by salting a mullet roe sac and then pressing it between two pieces of wood and air-drying it. When cured it is then covered in a layer of beeswax and sold for an extortionate price in flash delis all over the world. It gets its name from the Arabic batarekh and is found in various guises across the Middle East.

Like all seafood and Italian food it is at its best at its most simple. Just grate it onto a bowl of pasta that’s been doused in garlic infused-olive-oil and lemon zest and shower it in parsley and you will be eating the very essence of Sardinia.











We had a go at cooking an improvised version of spaghetti alla bottarga in our outdoor kitchen at Casa Teulada whilst we were in Sardinia and loved it so much that I made it my mission to recreate it properly back in my kitchen in Sweden. With a recipe from Mario Batali as a guide I put my waxy block of fishy gold to good use.




Ingredients:

Top quality spaghetti
Bottarga
Italian parsley
Olive oil
2 cloves of garlic
1 lemon
Chilli flakes
Salt and pepper

Method:

Boil the pasta in salted water.

Meanwhile gently heat an indecent glug of olive oil in a cast iron pan and add the thinly sliced garlic and chilli flakes. You just want the garlic to warm through and lose its raw edge which will take no more than a few minutes. If you've got some bottarga powder as well as the roe, sprinkle some into the oil for a deeper flavour.

Then when the pasta is cooked use a claw and add the pasta to the garlicky oil. Flick in some of the magical pasta water and toss. Then serve in a bowl and sprinkle with finely chopped parsley, lemon zest and then triumphantly grate over a generous amount of bottarga. Make haste and serve pronto.



Washed down with an icy bottle of Vermentino, each forkful transports you back to the warm, breezy shores of Sardinia.

This post has been entered into the Grantourismo HomeAway Holiday-Rentals travel blogging competition which you can read about here and on www.homeaway.co.uk

For more information about bottarga and Sardinia have a look at these sites:

Gastroanthropology on bottarga
Granturismo themselves on the delicacies of Sardinia and even more bizarrely their account of staying in our apartment!
Practically Edible on Bottarga
One Bite on Bottarga

Langoustine Fregola

One of our favourite meals in Sardinia was a bowlful of comforting fregola, strewn with mussels and fire licked vegetables, laced with mullet stock and lifted by a kick of chilli and a blast of lemon zest. It was our take on a Sardinian classic. Just without the pricey clams, saffron or tomatoes! After we’d devoured what was in our tangerine coloured bowls, I couldn’t help myself from scooping out the residual grains of moistened fregola from the discarded mussel shells.

Fresh from having our fregola virginity stripped away from us, my curiosity took over and lead me into the darkened corners of the information super-highway, where people discuss how to hand roll semolina so it turns into perfectly irregular nuggets of pasta-cum-couscous. It seems that fregola is a culinary palimpsest, showing the influence that Arabic culture has imparted on Italy. All of which is fairly ironic considering some of the nationalistic rumblings that occasionally get expelled from the mouths of officious Italian politicians about evil foreign food.

The main differences between the two are that fregola is toasted, giving it a nutty quality and that couscous tends to be much more granular. Meanwhile, to confuse matter, Israeli couscous is normally the size of a small pea and untoasted.

The fregola we encountered in Sardinia was gnarly and unevenly coloured which gives it a characteristic, hand made charm and could well be the basis for its name. As SFGate says, “The name fregola probably derives from Italian fregare, meaning to rub, an apt description of how moistened semolina is transformed into fregola's coarse crumbs.”

So back in Sweden I decided to revisit our Sardinian adventures by creating a bowl of langoustine loaded fregola as a sort of Sarda-Scandi fusion.





I blitzed the Fishchurch and left carrying a bagful of langoustines and a hake carcass which I had wangled for free. Brilliantly, the fishmonger had been more careless than frugal so there was still plenty of meat on the bones, especially around the head, so it made for excellent stock.

Ingredients:

1 hake carcass plus accompanying stock vegetables in order to make a litre of fish stock
200 grams of fregola
4 raw langoustines
2 handfuls of spinach
2 cloves of garlic
1 onion - finely chopped
Orange zest
Half a finely chopped red chilli
Olive oil
Salt
Pepper
Chilli sauce

Method:

Boil the fish carcass along with a carrot, a stick of celery and an onion for 30 minutes. Strain the liquid and discard the bone and keep any meat that falls off. Reduce the stock, but don’t go too crazy because it can go gluey.

Meanwhile sauté the onion until softened and add the minced garlic. Then add the fregola and enough stock to cover. Cook until the fregola is soft and season. Grate the zest of an orange into the fregola and stir through half a red chilli. Then add the langoustines and cook them until they change colour followed by the spinach which you just want to wilt and add colour.

Check the seasoning and serve with the claws hanging over the edge of the bowl. I added a splash of chilli sauce at the end just to give it a lift as well, but that’s optional.



It’s very moreish. Luckily I didn’t eat both portions and managed to save some fregola for my next meal, which found its way into a roasted red pepper.

Further reading:

Chocolate and Zucchini recipe for fregola sarda
SFGate on fregola
Fregola with leeks and sausage
Fregola with goats curd, tomatoes and asparagus on Eat Like a Girl
Fregola sarda with vegetables and wild garlic pesto
Artisan pastas
How to make fregola by hand

Cooking in Sardinia

We spent an indecently brilliant week in South West Sardinia, staying in an utterly perfect apartment, soaking up sunshine like a roll of Bounty and gorging on food that was so fresh and irregularly shaped that it would have given a supermarket buyer an aneurism. We whiled away our days on sensational beaches and the evenings cooking the best food Sardinia’s lader had to offer on our patio.

You’d expect Sardinia to be obsessed with fish, but curiously it isn’t. Historically Sardinia is a land of hunters who stayed away from the coastline to avoid marauders and malaria whilst spearing wild boar and roasting a variety of animals over juniper wood fires. They are famous for their pork, lamb and goat rather than fancy fish dishes.



Isola di San Pietro, marooned off the industrial zone of Portovesme is a notable exception, given that it is often touted as being the home to the world’s best tuna. The island was named, apparently, after Saint Peter who landed there around AD46 to avoid some vicious baddies. He chose a good place to drop into because it is a stunning island that reminded us of a mini Monaco crossed with Havanna.



If you are fortunate enough to get stranded here, you must try their local specialties of tuna such as intestine and a type of ham like salt cured tuna fillet called mosciame which was a revelation. I had to erect a mini barrier to stop Cowie’s fork from infiltrating my plate! All of this tuna-mania is based on the ancient island ritual for catching the fish in enormous nets which bring the tuna into an a small harbour in Carloforte where the sea turns red as they club the tuna to death. It’s all pretty grim, but the tuna tastes amazing. The videos below show the complex series of nets that are placed meticulously to trap the fish… and then the second video shows the catch being landed and the sea turning red. It’s quite dramatic. Look out for a tuna that is the size of a small London flat. But if you’ve feeling squeamish, be warned…







Other Sardinian specialities include fregula – which is a sort of pasta version of couscous, bottarga – which is salted and dried mullet roe with a flavour that is reminiscent of anchovies and a very flat crisp bread called Pane Carasau – which is, bizarrely quite Scandinavian.

We only ate out once, so had the luxury of cooking with each other for the first time in months. We came back from Teulada’s well stocked market with our fingers almost bleeding from carrying bags full of ripe produce such as gorgeous peaches, melons that smelled indecently fresh and some pecorino that had to be taken away from me because I was nibbling it all the way home.

I’ve got a few recipes set aside for further posts including a cauliflower salad, fun with fregula and spaghetti with bottarga, so in the meantime, here’s a taste of some of the most pleasurable and simple meals of our year so far…





We quickly singed peaches, figs and apricots over the coals and provocatively draped them with hand carved local ham and were in awe of how good they were. It’s a sickening cliché, but when food is this fresh all treating it simply works best.



An amazing fish stew made by charring a range of Mediterranean vegetables over some very hot coals with grey mullet and a garlic tomato concoction.



A super fresh tomato, mozzarella and basil salad.



Fregula with charred Mediterranean vegetables and mussels.



Smokey aubergine dip with tapenade



Cauliflower salad with olives, sun dried tomatoes and chilli



Spaghetti alla bottarga

Further reading:

The Sardinian Cookbook
Pane Carasau
The tuna rap of Carloforte
Casa Teulada