A nice pasta with unusual flavours. Use good-quality Italian sausages for this if you can find them.
Wine Suggestion: As this dish is full-flavoured we’d suggest a full flavoured white like Cline Cellars Sonoma Coast Chardonnay, which has a wonderful Californian ripeness combined with a core of fresh minerality and zing from the cooling breezes and fog coming through the Petaluma Gap each day. The subtle oak gives a lovely texture which helps matching this dish too.
Pasta with fennel, sausage and courgette – serves 4
- 3 good-quality pork sausages (we like Italian sausages)
- 1 tsp olive oil
- ½ small fennel bulb, trim off any green bits and chop finey, reserve any fronds to garnish
- ½ onion, diced
- 2 big cloves of garlic, finely chopped
- 200g rigatoni pasta
- zest and juice of a lemon
- 100g mascarpone
- 1 medium-large courgete, grated
- 1 tbsp toasted pine nuts
- grated Parmesan (to serve)
Take the skins off the sausages and crumble them into small chunks. Heat the oil in a large frying pan, then fry the sausages until browned and crispy, breaking the lumps up with a wooden spoon. Scoop out with a slotted spoon and set aside.
Add the fennel, onion and garlic to the sausage fat in the pan and cook for about 10 minutes, or until softened but not coloured. You can add a splash of water if it starts to stick.
Bring a large pan of salty water to the boil, add the pasta and cook according to the timings on the pack. Drain but reserve a mugful of the cooking water.
Return the frying pan to the heat and stir in the lemon zest, lemon juice, mascarpone, grated courgette and a splash of pasta cooking water. Bubble for 2 minutes, then stir in the cooked pasta and sausages. Season, then serve garnished with fennel fronds, pine nuts and Parmesan.
(Original recipe from BBC Good Food)
Jono & Jules do food & wine 
You’ve featured Italian sausage several times and I wondered what style you use. Is it an imported fresh cooking sausage? Flavours of pepper, wild fennel, garlic and chilli are all common (not necessarily all at the same time), but the particular thing I associate with Italian sausage is being 100% meat (save only seasoning). I’m not sure the originally recommended Cumberland would work well, here.
Hi Clive. We used to beg Italian restaurants to sell us some but we can get them quite easily now in good food shops. We buy a brand called Levoni – we like them flavoured with fennel and there is a spicy version too depending what you’re cooking. J&J
I don’t think the Levoni brand is widely available in the UK, but there is ‘Salsicciamo’ which are made here (supposedly to authentic Italian recipes) in four different varieties. I’ve not tried them, but make nearly all of my own sausages, anyway, as it’s easy enough to put together a pure pork sausage with any of the usual flavourings.
Well done – we haven’t tried making our own sausages yet!