Paccheri alla Napoletana

Paccheri are a Campanian pasta shaped like giant macaroni, made from durum-wheat semolina and long tied to the pasta town of Gragnano near Naples. The name comes from the Neapolitan pacca, an open-handed slap, a nod to the way the wide tubes flop down onto the plate; for the same reason they are also called schiaffoni. For centuries they were humble food, the pasta of the poor, cheap to make and filling. Alla napoletana, they are dressed in a long-cooked tomato sugo softened with a little lardo and built on a soffritto of onion, carrot and celery, then tossed with basil and grated cheese. A well-loved legend holds that the big tubes were once used to smuggle prized Neapolitan garlic across the Alps, a few cloves hidden inside each pacchero to slip past protective tariffs.

Big, chewy tubes with a firm al dente bite, each one flooded with a sweet-sharp tomato sauce cooked down to a deep, glossy red. The lardo rounds the tomato's acidity, basil lifts it, and the sauce pools inside the paccheri so every piece is a mouthful of pasta and sugo at once.

Paccheri are made from durum-wheat semolina, whose high, strong protein sets a firm gluten network that holds the thick walls of the tube together and gives that resilient al dente chew even at this size. The wide, hollow shape is the point of the dish: sauce coats the outside and floods the inside, so the pasta carries far more sugo than a flat shape could. The sauce is built by slow reduction. The soffritto's sugars gently brown for depth; the lardo renders, its fat dissolving the tomato's fat-soluble colour and aroma while smoothing the sharp acidity; and long simmering drives off water to concentrate the tomato. Cooking the pasta halfway in water and finishing it in the sauce lets it release starch, which emulsifies with the rendered fat so the sugo clings inside and out rather than sliding off.