Italian pasta with Eggplant, Tomatoes, Guanciale and Ricotta Salata
Servings: 4 people
Calories:
Ingredients
- 500 g Pasta
- 1 bottle Tomato sauce
- 400 g Guanciale Italian cured pork
- 100 g Ricotta Salata
- To taste tbsp Olive oil Extra Virgin
- 1 onion
- 1 clove garlic
- salt and pepper
- 1 fresh basil
- 4 tbsp Sunflower oil for frying
- flour for frying
- 100 g Parmigiano Reggiano
Instructions
- Cut Eggplant into small cubes approx 1.5 cm, add salt and leave it for 1 h with something heavy on top (this serves to remove the bitterness from the eggplant)
- Cut Guanciale into cubes and put them in a saucepan, stir fry until its crispy. In this step, you do not have to add oil because guanciale will release a lot of fat. Put the meat aside for now.
- Cut the garlic and onion into very small pieces, put the saucepan back on the fire with olive oil, garlic and onion and cook it slowly.
- When the onion and garlic are cooked well, add the guanciale meat and tomato sauce. Increase the heat for a moment and return it to the minimum heat to cook it slowly, at least for an hour (I had time to cook it for 3 h).Remember to add a bit of water so you will avoid burning the tomato sauce and this way you can cook it longer.
- Fill a saucepan with water and salt (more or less a ratio would be about 15gr x litre of water) and bring it to boil.
- Prepare a saucepan with sunflower oil, remove the salt from the eggplant and dry it well, pass the eggplant through the flour and fry it until it is golden brown, put the eggplant on absorbing paper and set aside.
- Taste and adjust the sauce if necessary. In this case with the products from Chiara I did not have to add sugar or salt at all as the product was already well equilibrated.
- Put the pasta to cook when the water begins to boil and cook it for 12 min (the cooking time on the package was 15 min).
- Meanwhile, the pasta is cooked, add the eggplant to the tomato sauce, prepare Parmigiano cheese and fresh basil.
- When the 12 minutes passed, drain the pasta (reserve a bit of water from the pasta), add the tomato sauce and water from the pasta and let it cook for a few more minutes.
- When you see that the pasta is ready (we like it al dente), add the Parmigiano cheese, olive oil and the basil leaves, salt and pepper.
- Serve on the warm plates and sprinkle ricotta salata on top!
