Sausage and Fennel Rigatoni
The sausages come out of their skins and are broken into rough lumps, not crumbs. Fennel seed toasted in the fat is what makes it taste Italian rather than like sausages in tomato sauce.
- Prep
- 10 min
- Cook
- 35 min
- Total
- 45 min
- Serves
- 4
- Revisions
- 1
Allergens
- Cereals containing gluten
- Milk
- Sulphites
Named from the ingredients as written, including those carried in from sub-recipes. This is not a guarantee — check the labels on what you actually buy, and note that a product’s recipe can change.
Ingredients
Serves
Sauce
Pasta
To finish
Method
Sauce
Split the sausage skins with a knife and squeeze the meat out into a bowl.
Heat the oil in a wide pan over high heat and add the sausage meat in rough 3cm lumps.
Leave them alone for 4 minutes to brown on one side, then break them up only into large pieces. Crumbled into mince it disappears into the sauce; in lumps you get something to bite on.
Push the meat aside, add the fennel seeds and chilli flakes to the clear space and let them sizzle for 30 seconds until they smell strongly of aniseed.
Add the onion and cook for 8 minutes until soft, then the garlic for 1 minute.
Pour in the wine, scrape the base clean and let it bubble away to almost nothing.
Add the tomatoes, the salt and 100ml water, and simmer for 15 minutes until thickened and darkened.
Pasta
Boil the rigatoni to 1 minute short of the packet time and save a mugful of water.
To finish
Turn the drained pasta through the sauce over low heat for a minute with a splash of the water.
Off the heat, stir in the Parmesan and the parsley, and serve.
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What to expect
- Taste
Savoury and fatty with a strong aniseed note running through it, and chilli warmth behind. The wine gives a background sharpness that keeps it from being heavy.
- Aroma
The fennel seed hitting the hot fat is the moment the dish announces itself, and it is worth standing over.
- Texture
The whole argument for the recipe. Firm pieces of meat against soft pasta and a clinging sauce. Crumbled sausage gives a uniform texture and a much duller dish.
- Sound
The sausage meat browning hard for the first four minutes.
- How the flavour moves
Fat and salt first, then fennel, then chilli arriving late and building.
- Serve it
Hot, served straight from the pan.
- Goes with
A bitter green salad — radicchio or rocket. A medium red.
Cook's notes
- Difficulty
Beginner.
- Cost
Low.
- Equipment
A wide pan and a pasta pan.
- When to make it
A weeknight.
- Best season
None.
- You know it is done when
Sausage lumps browned on at least one face, and a sauce darkened from red to brick with fat separating at the edges.
- And it feels like
Distinct pieces of sausage with a firm bite, in a sauce thick enough to sit inside the rigatoni.
- Food safety
Sausage meat is minced pork and the centre must be properly cooked; 75C/167F is a comfortable target. Browning plus fifteen minutes of simmering clears it easily, but keep the lumps to about 3cm rather than golf balls.
- Where it goes wrong
- Breaking the meat up into crumbs, which is the whole difference.
- Stirring it too early, so it never browns.
- Adding the fennel seed to the sauce rather than to hot fat.
- Cheap sausages, which are largely rusk and go to paste.
- Overcooking the pasta before it goes into the sauce.
- If it does go wrong
Greasy: pour some fat off after browning. Bland: salt, then more fennel seed toasted in a dry pan and crushed in at the end. Thin: simmer longer. Meat disappeared into the sauce: it was crumbled, and next time leave it alone for four minutes.
- Making it ahead
The sauce, up to three days.
- Keeping it
Three days for the sauce.
- Reheating
Low heat with a splash of water.
- Freezing
The sauce freezes for three months.
- Leftovers
Baked with mozzarella over it.
- Scaling it
Doubles well; brown the meat in two batches.
- Substitutions
Italian salsiccia if you can get it, in which case use half the fennel seed since the sausage already has some. Pork mince works with an extra half teaspoon of salt. Any large tubular pasta.
- Dietary swaps
Contains gluten and sulphites from the sausages, gluten again from the pasta, and milk from the Parmesan. Gluten-free sausages and pasta make it gluten free. Egg free and nut free.
- Shopping for it
A butcher's coarse pork sausage is noticeably better. Fennel seeds cost very little from an international grocer.
- Keeping the cost down
Cheap overall, and the sausages are the place to spend rather than save.
- Sustainability
Pork's footprint is roughly a fifth of beef's per kilogram, and 500g feeds four here with a great deal of pasta and tomato around it. Six sausages instead of eight, with a sliced fennel bulb making up the bulk, is a good version rather than a reduced one. Good vegetarian sausages work in this recipe because the fennel and chilli are carrying the flavour rather than the meat.
- Nutrition
Rich. The sausage carries the fat and the salt.
- Worth it?
Two teaspoons of fennel seed and a decision not to break the meat up, and a pack of sausages becomes a restaurant dish.
Where it comes from
- Origin
Italy for the idea, Italian-American restaurants for this exact dish.
- Also called
Rigatoni con salsiccia e finocchio.
- Said out loud
sal-SEE-cha eh fee-NOK-yo.
- What the name means
Sausage and fennel.
- History
Fennel seed in pork sausage is characteristic of Italian salsiccia across much of the country, and pork with fennel is an old pairing in central Italian cooking generally — porchetta is the obvious relative. The pasta dish in this form belongs to Italian-American restaurant cooking, which is where the combination of sausage, fennel, chilli and a short tomato sauce over rigatoni became standard.
- Why it matters
A restaurant dish that translated well to home cooking, and one of the most reliably good things to do with British sausages.
- When it is eaten
A weeknight.
- The traditional way
Browning meat hard before building a sauce around it, and toasting whole spices in fat.
- How it changed
Outside Italy the fennel seed has to be added, because British and American sausages generally do not contain it.
- Regional variations
With cream in many restaurant versions; with fennel bulb as well as seed; with 'nduja instead of chilli flakes, which is southern and excellent.
- How this version differs
Lumps rather than crumbs, and the fennel seed toasted in the fat rather than added with the tomatoes. This site also has Pork and Fennel Meatballs, which is the same flavour pairing in a different form.
- Sources and credit
None.
Cacio e Pepe
Chicken Alfredo
Pasta alla Norma
Spaghetti Aglio e Olio
Tagliatelle al Ragù
Slow-Cooked Beef Ragu
Italian
Pasta
Main courses
Dinner
Pork