I haven’t forgotten my Tucci series. Nor any of the series – like The Bread & Soup Project, or the L-Word Project, or getting to every Peruvian restaurant in the city, or, all the pizzerias, or shawarma, or… there are just too many of them, and as you may have noticed, I’m currently very devoted to pastas. These things move in cycles and waves. It all works out in the end.

On to the Calabria episode of Tucci’s Searching for Italy series. Although he did try a little ‘nduja sausage at some point in the show, he seemed to be eschewing the classic spicy dishes of the region. Perhaps just a personal preference – I haven’t seen him leaning towards spice on any of the episodes so far. His loss. Such is life.

This time, he zoomed in on the preparation of two different spaghetti dishes, and since both sounded interesting, and neither was a dish I was familiar with, I’m giving you both. Now, I did a bit of research, given that I wasn’t familiar with either, and neither version he focused on would fit comfortably into the classic way of preparing them. But they’re not way off, they’re just fancied up versions from the restaurants he frequented, rather than homestyle preparations.

Because both of these dishes are photo intensive, I’m going to split this into two posts. Today, we’ll start with Spaghetti alle cipolle rosse, spaghetti with red onions.

Let’s start with the onions themselves – I don’t have access to the traditional red onions of Tropea, in Calabria, which are a very sweet red onion. But the Peruvian ones we have here are fairly sweet, certainly by comparison to the red onions I used to get back in the States (which might explain why so many people back there don’t like raw red onions, but here they’re common on dishes). This is for two portions: two red onions, a stalk of celery, a small carrot, a garlic clove, half a zucchini, bay leaf, some basil, egg and flour based spaghetti rather than semolina, and ricotta salata, the salted and pressed version of ricotta.

In the show, the chef makes a quick vegetable broth. While I’ve certainly put the odd end of a zucchini into making a stock, just saved among vegetable scraps, I don’t know that I’ve ever had it be kind of the focus flavor. I sliced up the zucchini, carrot, celery, and half of one of the onions, plus the bay leaf, put them in a small pot with water, brought it to a simmer for thirty minutes, then strained it and kept it hot. Note, I didn’t put any salt or pepper into this – from what I could tell, the chef didn’t – not uncommon when you’re going to be concentrating the stock later, as you’ll see – you don’t want it to make the dish too salty.

In a bit of olive oil, start sweating the remaining sliced onions and the garlic over low heat. Stir them regularly. Because these onions aren’t as sweet as the Calabrian ones, I added a large pinch of sugar – probably about half of a demitasse spoonful, along with a pinch of salt. Just to give the dish that hint more of sweetness which it apparently traditionally has.

After about twenty minutes the onions will be limp and just barely starting to take on a golden tinge. We don’t want to actually brown them.

Add a ladle of the hot vegetable stock. Basically, we’re going to cook the onions risotto style, adding a ladle at a time and letting it cook down, infusing the onions with the concentrated stock flavor. This is why, as I noted, the stock is unsalted, because basically we’re evaporating all the water out of it, just leaving behind the flavors. I had about a liter and a half of stock, and I used about a liter of it in this process – taking about another twenty minutes.

At this point the onions are just barely holding on to their structure. Sometime during the last ladleful, when I knew I was just a few minutes from having the onions fall apart completely, I dropped the spaghetti into my salted boiling water (to which, though the chef didn’t on the show, I added in the last half liter of the stock, just to absorb more of that flavor directly into the spaghetti).

Since this was fresh spaghetti, I let it come back to a boil, boiled it for two minutes, and then scooped it out and into the onions. I added a ladle of the salted water and finished cooking the spaghetti for another two to three minutes in that, adding a little more pasta water as needed.

When the spaghetti was properly al dente I let the sauce finish cooking down until it became creamy and clingy.

Off the heat, added in the crumbled ricotta salata and the basil, finely julienned. A few grinds of pepper, and I felt it needed a pinch more of salt, and it was ready.

Really, really good. I wasn’t totally sure what to expect, but the onions end up creating such a beautiful flavor when cooked this way, balanced against the cheese and basil, I loved it.

Next up, part “b” of the Calabria episode.