Whole-Grain Reginetti with Rapini and Sausage

Stateside, pasta with rapini and sausage is much more common than the traditional Puglian combo of orecchiette, rapini and anchovies. We’re not big fans of supermarket dried orecchiette, so our pasta of choice for this is the outstanding dried organic whole-grain reginetti from New York-based Sfloglini. But feel free to use any short pasta shape you like; farfalle or penne both work well.

READ: Rapini-to-riches tale: A New York Chef’s recipe inspires a fresh take on a favorite weeknight pasta

The dish calls for bread crumbs toasted in oil with garlic, but even without that flourish, it’s excellent, so if you want to get this on the table in a jiff, omit them. (On the other hand, if you do make our garlic bread crumbs, you’ll have extra — enough for about three batches of the dish, and they’ll keep for a week or more stored in an airtight container.)

Our treatment of the rapini was inspired by a recipe in New York chef Missy Robbins’ 2021 cookbook Pasta. Robbins has you separate the rapini leaves from the stems and florets, chop the leaves finely, and chop the rest into small pieces. She braises the greens with anchovies in white wine and water. Again, we’re not using the anchovies, but we love the way cutting everything so small and braising encourages the greens to break down into a sauce.

Serves 3 to 4.

Ingredients

FOR THE GARLIC BREAD CRUMBS:

1/4 cup olive oil

2 garlic cloves, peeled and lightly smashed

1/2 cup bread crumbs (not panko)