Match of the week

Pasta arrabbiata with sangiovese

Posted by Fiona Beckett (Google+) on August 5 2013 at 11:03

What happens when you choose a wine to pair with a particular dish and the dish doesn’t materialise? Well, if you’re lucky it matches equally well.

Arrriving back in Languedoc yesterday evening (a Sunday) with all the local shops shut we breathed a sigh of relief that there was at least the local pizzeria - pulling out a robust bottle of Tuscan red, Il Secondo di Pacina 2010, to go with it.

Trouble was the pizzaria’s oven had broken down so NO pizza.

Fortunately we had some pasta - as always - in the cupboard so I made a scratch supper with a very pokey tomato sauce with a LOT of garlic, bacon, passata and a spoonful of hot pimenton which I realised afterwards was pretty well identical not only to an arrabbiatta as you can see from this recipe but to the near identical pasta sauce I made a year ago. Which goes to show either that I’m a cook of limited imagination or that it’s a super-reliable match.

You could obviously also drink other sangioveses with this type of pasta or - possibly even more appropriate - a southern Italian or a Sicilian red like a negroamaro or a primitivo - but not too modern or jammy a style

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