Recipes › Shallot › Shallot and Sausage Pasta with White Wine
Shallot and Sausage Pasta with White Wine
A proper weeknight pasta that leans entirely on a tangle of soft, sweet shallots melted down with Italian-style sausage and a generous slug of white wine. The shallots dissolve into the sauce and give it a silky, almost luxurious body without a drop of cream. It takes less than 30 minutes and tastes far more considered than the effort involved.
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Ingredients
- 500 g shallots, peeled, halved and thinly sliced
- 400 pork sausages, skins removed, meat crumbled into rough chunksItalian fennel sausages are ideal; any good-quality herby pork sausage works
- 3 tbsp olive oil
- 3 cloves garlic, thinly sliced
- ½ tsp dried chilli flakes
- 150 ml dry white wineuse chicken stock if you prefer to cook without wine
- 400 rigatoni or penne pasta
- 1 tsp fine sea salt
- 60 g Parmesan, finely grated, plus extra to servePecorino Romano works equally well
- 15 g flat-leaf parsley, roughly chopped (optional)
Contains: cereals gluten, milk, sulphites.
Method
- Bring a large pot of well-salted water to a boil for the pasta. Meanwhile, heat the olive oil in a wide, deep frying pan or sauté pan over a medium heat. Add the sliced shallots and a pinch of salt. Cook, stirring occasionally, for 8 minutes until softened and starting to turn golden at the edges.About 8 min
- Push the shallots to one side of the pan and increase the heat to medium-high. Add the crumbled sausage meat and press it into the pan. Leave it untouched for 2 minutes to get some colour, then break it up and stir it through the shallots. Cook for a further 3 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the sausage is cooked through and browned in places.About 5 min
- Add the sliced garlic and chilli flakes and stir for 1 minute. Pour in the white wine and let it bubble vigorously, scraping up any sticky bits from the base of the pan, until the wine has reduced by about half — roughly 2 minutes.About 3 min
- Drop the pasta into the boiling water and cook for 1 minute less than the packet instructions suggest.About 10 min
- Use a mug to scoop out 200ml of the pasta cooking water before draining. Add 100ml of it to the shallot and sausage pan and let everything simmer gently together on a low heat while the pasta finishes cooking.
- Drain the pasta and tip it directly into the pan with the sauce. Toss well over a medium heat for 1–2 minutes, adding splashes of the remaining pasta water to loosen the sauce until it coats the pasta in a glossy, emulsified film rather than pooling at the bottom.About 2 min
- Take the pan off the heat and stir in the grated Parmesan. Toss quickly and serve immediately in warmed bowls with extra Parmesan and the parsley scattered over if using.
Tips
- Don't skip the final 1–2 minutes of tossing the pasta in the sauce over heat — that's when it all comes together and the starchy water binds everything into a proper sauce rather than a slick of oil.
- If your sausages have a strong herb flavour already (sage, fennel, garlic), you can drop the chilli and let the sausage seasoning do the work.
- Use the pasta cooking water generously — it's the secret to a sauce that clings rather than slides off.
Ring the changes
- Make it smokier by adding 80g of diced pancetta or smoked bacon with the sausage meat.
- To make a vegetarian version, replace the sausage with 400g of roughly crumbled firm smoked tofu and add an extra teaspoon of fennel seeds with the garlic — check your Parmesan is vegetarian or swap for a vegetarian hard cheese. Note: remove the egg-free dietary tag if you use standard Parmesan.
Keeping it
Store leftovers in an airtight container in the fridge for up to 2 days. Reheat in a pan with a splash of water to loosen. Pasta will absorb the sauce as it sits, so it won't be quite as saucy the next day, but the flavour is still very good.
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