Orecchiette con Cime di Rapa

Name: Orecchiette con Cime di Rapa
Yield: Serves 4 as a starter or 2 as a main
Cuisine: Italian
Ingredients: 400 g tender, young cime di rapa, or 500 g if more mature; 2 cloves garlic, thinly sliced; grated Pecorino Romano, to serve; ½ teaspoon crushed dried chilli flakes; 1 recipe fresh orecchiette, or 200 g dried orecchiette (not so nice); 5 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

Preparation info

Serves
4
as a starter

Difficulty
Medium

Appears in

The Geometry of Pasta

By Caz Hildebrand and Jacob Kenedy

Published 2010

About

A practised hand can cook the orecchiette and cime di rapa simultaneously, in the same pot. This requires some understanding of both products — how fresh each is, the thickness of the pasta, etc. — in order to determine which goes in the water first. For simplicity, here are instructions to cook them separately.

Ingredients

1 recipe fresh orecchiette, or 200 g dried orecchiette (not so nice)
400 g

Starter
Main course
Vegetarian

Method

There are three ways to tell if cime di rapa are tender, new season’s or tougher, older ones:

– Outside of Italy, new season’s cime di rapa is hard to get and if you have any at all, they are likely tough and old.
– Look at the calendar – in October they are likely to be new season’s, getting tougher from mid-November onwards.
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