Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Eggplant at its best in sauce
Displays sweet, creamy flavors Bucatini in chunky eggplant sauce
Southern Italy is deeply fond of eggplant. Throughout the country — but particularly within the regions around and south of Rome — it is fried, stuffed, layered and baked, smoked and pureed and preserved in oil. It is also combined with pasta in a variety of delightfully diverse ways. In Sicily, the combination of pasta with eggplant is so essential that the general name for the dish, Pasta Alla Norma, conveys “pasta in the normal way.”
In one version, the eggplant may be cooked with only garlic and olive oil until it slowly dissolves into a nutty-tasting puree; in others, slices of eggplant may be fried before being heaped atop tomatoslicked tangles of pasta. It might be combined in a syrupy braise with sweet peppers or blended with potatoes and stuffed into ravioli.
Every summer, I parade these variations through the kitchen in a show of eggplant’s delicious versatility. A dish of bucatini cloaked in a chunky, brighttasting eggplant-tomato sauce has emerged over the years as the favorite. It is a recipe I learned from chef Micol Negrin, the founder of the Rustico Cooking school in New York who featured the dish in her 2002 cookbook “Rustico.” The eggplant is sliced into thin strips and then cooked gently in a pan of garlicinfused olive oil until it collapses. Peeled and grated (or chopped) tomato is added to the pan with fresh oregano to reduce and thicken, and torn basil leaves are tossed in at the end. Once the pasta is ready, it is added to the sauce with a bit of the pasta cooking water.
This sauce maximizes and concentrates the vegetables’ most luxurious aspects — the eggplant’s sweet, creamy flavors and the tomato’s rich, fruity ones — into a seamless coalescence.
If you make it, you’ll see that Negrin’s recipe calls for bucatini, a thick, spaghettilike pasta that is hollow. Its sturdy frame stands up to the full-bodied sauce. The chef says it is the commercial version of maccheroni al ferretto — pasta made at home, shaped around a knitting needle. But other shapes also work well with this sauce, she says, particularly short types with ridges, nooks or crannies such as penne rigate and rigatoni.
As for the eggplant, choose vegetables with shiny, taut skin and firm stems. In the Calabria region of Italy, Negrin says, cooks typically use the large, globe-shaped, violethued varieties with thin skins, often called Sicilian eggplants in the United States and known as violetta di Firenze in Italy. If you can find them, or any other of the lavender, thinskinned varieties, take them up — their finegrained flesh is often sweeter and more tender than standard varieties. Alternately, suggests Negrin, opt for long, slender Asian eggplants: “Japanese or Chinese eggplants will work beautifully, even if their texture is somewhat softer: After all, the eggplant is crushed, and is not meant to remain in distinct pieces.” If you use a variety with thicker skin, my preference is to remove it.
For the tomatoes, the variety is less important, although a deep red or black tomato makes for a more attractive sauce than a yellow one.
The olive oil, because its flavor is so central here, should be good quality and full-flavored (look for a harvest date on the bottle to verify freshness). Don’t worry that cooking with it will null the point: The heat is not so high as to damage the principal flavors. Instead, any off-characteristics in a lesser oil will carry into the sauce.
Negrin calls for dusting the plated pasta with sharp, earthy pecorino Romano, but I also like to shower it with toasted bread crumbs, tossed lightly with olive oil and baked at 400 degrees until copper-colored and shatteringly crisp.
Either one sounds a grounding note of contrast in this sultry ode to summer. Makes: 4 to 6 servings For a dairy-free option, substitute freshly toasted bread crumbs, tossed with a little oil and baked at 400 degrees until golden brown, for the cheese. Bucatini, sometimes called perciatelli, is available at Italian markets and at some Harris Teeter and Safeway stores as well as online purveyors.