Maccaronara

An iconic Campanian pasta, maccaronara is made from a soft, stretchy dough that yields a delightful chewy noodle - almost the same shape / consistency as an udon noodle.

At the restaurant, we always serve it tossed with a little Neapolitan ragu because the simple preparation highlights its distinctive, resilient texture. Most pasta machines have settings for tagliatelle and tonnarelli. Maccaronara is somewhere in between. The pasta sheets for it are thicker than the sheets for tagliatelle, but the noddle is narrower, though not as narrow as tonnarelli. Unless you have a model that allows for cutting the 1/8 inch wide noodles described in the recipe, I suggest you cut the noodles by hand.

This recipe makes about 2 1/2 pounds of pasta dough, which would be enough to serve 8 dinner-sized portions of Maccaronara with Ragu alla Napoletana. Below includes instructions for making 4 dinner portions of the finished pasta - so shape it all and freeze half of the shaped pasta for another day. Or, double the amount of sauce if you're cooking for a crowd!