Antipasti pasta.
I've got a little bit of prosciutto in, couple ounces.
I have a sweet salami with fennel.
(knife chopping)
And then I have a little tiny piece of spicy soppressata.
Any assorted salami works in this.
So I have a little bit of provolone here, same deal.
I'm gonna cut it into sticks, and chop it,
and add it to,
I have a little bit of smoked mozzarella,
and I have a little bit of fresh mozzarella.
So I have about a cup
and a half to two cups of diced cheese.
And we have about the same amount of meat.
This skillet we're gonna render the meat in.
And that just has a little drizzle of olive oil,
didn't even coat the bottom of the pan.
So we have little olive oil there.
In the other pan, we're gonna char our greens.
One small head of escarole,
and I'm just spraying it
with a little non-aerosol olive oil.
And I'm gonna put that cut side down
with just a little salt and pepper
on the greens themselves.
And then I have my favorite,
I love charred radicchio.
Salt and pepper.
And we're just developing their flavor,
and giving them a nice little smoky finish.
(greens sizzling)
Okay.
Goes into our skillet.
This is a cast iron skillet over about medium-high heat.
And now we're gonna render out,
of course, it's cured meat, you can eat it just like this.
We're just trying to get a little of the flavor to weep out.
We render this a little bit,
and we add our garlic.
(meat sizzling)
Give that a little stir.
(greens sizzling)
Oh, nice, beautiful.
Gorgeous.
Turn that off.
Now, we'll just let these cool a bit,
obviously, so we can chop them to add them to our dish.
We do salt the pasta water.
We don't add any salt to this part of the dish,
obviously, 'cause you've got all those meats,
and they're very salty.
Now, this is gemelli,
and we are going to cook any short cut pasta for this dish.
For one minute less than the package instructions,
'cause it will continue to cook
when we combine everything together.
This is a Sicilian white wine,
so we put about a half a cup of that in,
and that'll give it a nice brightness.
You could also use dry vermouth.
Just a little splash of something acidic and bright.
And now, just to give us enough juice
to toss everything together,
about a half a cup, about an equal amount
of chicken, or vegetable, or beef stock,
whatever you have in the pantry.
We could throw in our pickled veg and olive.
So now for our greens,
I'm gonna cut into the charred radicchio on an angle,
now that it's cool enough to handle.
And then I'm just gonna run my knife through it.
(greens crunching)
Okay, there we go.
With the escarole, I just coarsely chop it,
and I've stacked them both together.
(Greens crunching)
Just bite size pieces,
and kind of go cross hatch down the charred escarole,
so you get to the core.
We reserve a little bit of that starchy water.
Turn the stove off.
Drain our short cut pasta.
(water splashes)
(pasta plunks)
And then we're gonna marry it, first to the meat,
start mixing that together.
Then I'm gonna try
and sneak in half of our greens and cheese.
This is the charred radicchio and escarole.
Little bit of that starchy cooking water.
Okay.
(utensil clangs)
Switch to tongs.
This is why we drain it a little early.
We're then going to marry this all together,
and it keeps cooking while it's in this hot pan
with all of the other ingredients.
You can take really good fruity olive oil,
and drizzle that over the top, right before you serve.
Weighs as much as a small child (giggles).
Wow, look at that thing.
That is crazy.
(pans clanging)
It's a large child.
That's a very large child.
At least a medium child now.
It's a biggie.
But it's a beauty.
And then parsley.
(screen twinkles)