Weekly Dinner for Two

on 2022-09-12

Spaghetti alla NeranoπŸ”—


Thanks to Stanley Tucci, the very regional yet fantastic Spaghetti alla Nerano walks out of Italy and gets popular worldwide. In his show In Search of Italy, he crowns it as his favorite dish worth flying half of the world for. The original plate he's obsessed with is served at a stormfront restaurant in Nerano, where the dish is named after.

Curious about how or why it’s so good, I decided to hack the recipe and reverse-engineer myself. Now it has become my new obsession after Cabonaro. It's an interesting and fun project. I enjoyed quite a lot hacking and improvising that eventually leads to definitely not the authentic but my take on the recipe. As a matter of fact, I'm trying to "recreate" a regional classic from halfway across the world where I've never been to. Neither have I ever tried the dish itself. Nor do I have the key ingredient (more on that later) only available to that area. Here I am whipping up the closest approximation of what I'd consider a good zucchini pasta based on the information I could gather. For all the Italians and those who really know what's going on, please don't pound too hard on my (mis)interpretation. For those who want some ideas of how to make zucchini themed pasta, let me share my findings with you.

Like many Italian classics, it's simple and advanced. Simple in terms of very short ingredient list. Only a handful of things needed but high quality required as everyone plays a key role and you really want them to shine. Advanced in terms of precise technique to get things right. It takes practice to nail all the details to execute perfectly. No exception Spaghetti alla Nerano is one of them. Many describe it as the zucchini version of Cacio e Pepe. The expectation is spaghetti fully coated with sweet floral zucchini aroma infused creamy sauce. It's a stroll to the summer garden, fragrant and delightful. Or it's my imagination of what the dish can deliver in the best way.

The traditional method TL;DR version goes as follows.

  1. Cut zucchini into coins not too thin not too thick
  2. Fry them till golden brown
  3. Cook pasta till Al-dente
  4. Add in fried zucchini, butter and cheese (Provolone del Monaco)
  5. Fold everything together until desired sauce consistency is form
  6. Serve with grated parm

The specific ingredient mentioned earlier is the cheese. It's a specific type of provolone probably only available to the local area. The sliced or block provolone you can find here in the supermarket is totally different and thus not a substitute. Why? The cheese is essential to the dish as it's a sauce builder. It creates the creamy silky consistency that binds zucchini flavor infused starch pasta water, butter fat, milk solid and protein into a cohesive stable emulsion, in other words, luscious mouthfeel. It has distinctive notes that pairs well with zucchini. Unfortunately, the variety here in the U.S. is more of a stringy cheese rather than a melting cheese. As a result, it does not melt nicely into a glassy cheese sauce. Instead, it tightens up so much and coagulates into cheese rubber under heat. Consider it as a mozzarella cousin, great for cheese pull but not for cheese sauce.

Another challenge is the need to fry. To extract most flavor out of mild zucchini, the original recipe calls for properly deep frying zucchini coins. As it's a lot of them (roughly 2-3 zucchinis per serving) and proper deep frying only goes in small batches. It's a prohibitively high cost for weeknight cooking.

To get around the above two road blockers, I came up with the following workarounds.

  • To avoid deep frying, I use a big sheet tray brushed with a generous amount of oil. Lay down zucchini coins and bake them for 20min at 450F. Make sure they are even thickness to avoid extra browned ones.
  • To substitute melting provolone, I use sour cream. It's a super duper handy trick for making creamy sauce I use all the time. Sour cream or any kind of "savory yogurt product", like cottage cheese, is a great replacement for butter or melting cheese when their function is to create stable emulsification. Not to mention so much healthier, with reliable results and great tasty. Unlike butter or cheese that will separate sauce if temperature is not in the range or vigorous whisking is not timely applied. My savory yogurt method is fool-proof. The acid agent in those products will prevent separation no matter how you incorporate them. Just stir until sour cream is evenly distributed.
  • To avoid using 6 zucchinis for one dinner (mainly due to the limitation of tray surface area), I substitute half of the zucchinis with other vegetables. Green peas and yellow chives are excellent choices. Both have very matching flavor profiles. Green peas have a similar sweet note (same axis), just sweeter. Yellow chives have a very floral oniony aroma (perpendicular axis), perfect complement.

Recipe Development LogπŸ”—

I've made three tries. Each teaches something and each improves upon the previous.

  1. Mozzarella and peas - mistakes: i) over baked some of the zucchinis; ii) use the stringy mozzarella
  2. American Provolone slice and peas - mistake: provolone is still a stringy cheese
  3. Sour cream and yellow chives - best version so far

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