When the season starts, zucchini become a vegetable that you must have in the fridge because it’s good to always have them on hand. If nothing else, you can slather them with potatoes, season them with good olive oil and you have a great side dish. However, you can also prepare a main dish from zucchini with just a few other ingredients. Today we are thinking about pasta in zucchini sauce, or Spaghetti Nerano. Lovers of pasta and Italian cuisine probably know about this dish, but even though it is a well-known recipe, it is still not as popular as some other Italian pastas. Well, it’s our job to remind you of a handy recipe if you missed it, but also to discover new, phenomenal flavors!
So, the main and almost the only role in the sauce is played by zucchini, but this does not mean that the dish has a poor taste. In fact, it is very tasty and creamy! The key is in the method of preparing the zucchini, which is to fry them. Frying zucchini gives it a special juiciness and nutty aroma, even sweetness. To achieve the desired result, thinly sliced zucchini are fried in olive oil, then the same oil is flavored with garlic. An additional trick is to fry the zucchini in advance, because they become even tastier after they have aged. If you have time, it’s worth trying because the Italians claim that the difference is big!
Another very important thing for the success of the dish is that you use young zucchini. Roughly guide yourself so that you can encircle the flask with your thumb and index or middle finger. Larger, overgrown zucchini, the seeds of which are already clearly visible in cross-section, are not a good choice for Nerano pasta because they are full of water and texture, so the taste is not the same anymore.
To make the dish creamy, you don’t need cooking cream, quite the opposite! Adding cream to this dish, which some might think is a good idea, would just ruin everything. First, cream drastically changes the taste of the dish, so even though it is delicious in itself, it is not desirable in everything. Of course, there is nothing worse than dry, sticky manistra without juiciness, but here too, a method as old as cooking pasta is used, which is to add water from cooking the pasta to the sauce. This water is full of starch that acts as an emulsifier, binding the ingredients together, and at the same time makes the sauce creamy.
The next ingredient that this pasta cannot do without is cheese, the original Provolone del Monaco. It is a special, local Campania type of provolone cheese. We know that Monaco it’s confusing in the name, but we checked and it has nothing to do with Monaco, where Monte Carlo is because it means monk. Although monks are the authors of many cheeses throughout Europe, this is not the case here, rather the producers often wore robes similar to monks’ habits. Given that this type of provolone is difficult to find outside of Campania, and that our offer is mostly mild, industrial cheeses of often questionable quality, it is best to skip provolone altogether and prepare the dish with high-quality Parmesan cheese. The recipe definitely includes it and you will get the closest to the original taste.
Finally, some people like to add two basil leaves, even mint, but we like to stick to freshly ground black pepper, and you try what you like!
Pasta Nerano
Ingredients
400 g of spaghetti
120 g of Parmesan cheese
4 zucchini
2 cloves of garlic
olive oil
salt
freshly ground black pepper
Preparation
Cut the zucchini into thin slices and fry in olive oil in several rounds. Remove them to the side and add garlic to the same oil to flavor the oil. You can cut the cloves in half and make sure they don’t burn.
Meanwhile, cook the spaghetti.
Return the zucchini to the pan and slowly add the pasta cooking water with a ladle until you get a creamy sauce.
Put the cooked spaghetti in the sauce al denteadd grated cheese and freshly ground black pepper and combine everything.
