This pasta alla Zozzona recipe makes a thick and delicious sauce. It is rich and bursting with flavour! Guanciale and Italian sausage round this off perfectly! This recipe is quite a special one, and is sure to impress any of your dinner guests. This uses a lot of the same ingredients and techniques as my Carbonara recipe. If you’ve bought the special ingredients to make one, you should definitely try the other too!

Pasta alla Zozzona

Zozzona is an interesting pasta dish. This is because it is quite new and unclear in it’s origins! It appeared in Lazio, Italy around the 1960s and has had a large surge in popularity in recent years on social media.

Pasta alla Zozzona is a Roman pasta. Separate from one of the core four Roman pastas (Cacio e Pepe, alla Gricia, Amatriciana and Carbonara), it actually incorporates most of them together. It is mostly like Amatriciana, a tomato sauce with guanciale in it. It incorporates, however, the same egg and pecorino mix used in Carbonara in the sauce to thicken it. This creates a wonderfully silky, thick and creamy sauce. The only ingredient used in Zozzona that doesn’t exist in any of the other Roman pastas is Italian sausages. These give a lovely herby, spicy layer to the overall flavour profile.

Due to it’s use of ingredients and techniques shared across the other Roman pastas, it is sometimes regarded as the secret fifth Roman pasta. People also sometimes refer to it as a celebration of local cooking and food culture! I think it is simply a delicious dish that comes together to be so much more than a sum of it’s parts. Definitely a recipe you should consider adding to your repertoire. This article is in Italian, but gives and interesting view on the histor o the dish!

My Zozzona Recipe

The first thing you should do with this recipe is get going on rendering the guanciale. You can do everything else while this is happening! Cut the rind off the guanciale, cube it and put it straight into a cold, dry pan. Put the heat on and let the fat slowly melt and render out. This will crisp up the meat, and also provide all the fat required to cook the rest of the dish!

I the meantime you can grate your cheese and mix it with the egg yolks, dice an onion, get your pasta on the boil and deskin your sausages. Once the guanciale is fried off, remove it and set aside. Use some of the fat to temper the egg and cheese mix and fry off the sausages in the rest. Once the sausages are browned, add the onion and fry that off.

The sauce is then a simple sauce of crushed tomatoes. Add these straight to the sausages and onions with a little tomato puree and allow them to cook down. Add a little pasta water towards the end, and then add in the pasta and remove from the heat. Once this is done, add the egg and cheese and mix thoroughly to combine without the egg scrambling.

A Note on Ingredients

This dish benefits hugely from quality ingredients. I say that in most of my recipes, but this really does. The ingredients I use do not have adequate replacements. Pancetta cannot be substituted for guanciale, they simply aren’t the same. Pecorino is also not substitutable with parmesan, the flavour profiles are completely different. Do try to get these, even if it means going out of your way!

Italian sausages are hard to find, but these can be improvised. They mostly contain fennel seeds, with he addition of garlic, paprika and nutmeg. You can make this mix at home as a substitute!

Pasta alla Zozzona. Rich, Creamy & Delicious!

This pasta alla Zozzona recipe makes a thick and delicious sauce. It is rich and bursting with flavour! Guanciale and Italian sausage round this off perfectly!

Print Recipe Pin Recipe

Prep Time 10 minutes mins

Cook Time 20 minutes mins

Total Time 30 minutes mins

Servings: 2 people

Course: Main Course, Pasta

Cuisine: Italian

Ingredients Method

Ingredients

  

If Making Your Own Sausage Mix

• 200 g Pork Mince 20% fat
• 1.5 tbsp Fennel Seeds
• 2 tsp Garlic Powder
• 2 tsp Paprika
• 0.5 tsp Nutmeg
• 0.5 tsp Black Pepper
• 0.5 tsp Salt

Main Ingredients

• 200 g Rigatoni Pasta
• 125 g Guanciale
• 200 g Italian Sausage
• 0.5 Yellow Onion
• 400 g Crushed Tomatoes
• 1 tbsp Tomato Puree
• 4 Egg Yolks
• 80 g Pecorino
• 1 tsp Black Pepper

Method

 

1. Cut the rind off the guanciale and cut it into cubes. Add it to a cold, dry pan and put the heat on medium.
2. If making your own Italian sausage, grind the spices and mix into the sausage meat well.
3. Separate the egg yolks, grate the pecorino and grind the peppercorns and mix together into a paste.
4. Once the guanciale is crisp and the fat is rendered, remove and set side. Add a couple of spoons of the fat to the egg mix and stir it in.
5. Crumble the sausage into the pan and fry off in the guanciale fat for 3-5 minutes.
6. Finely dice the onion and add it to the pan once the sausage has browned off. Cook off for another 3 minutes or so, until soft and golden.
7. Add in the tomato puree and crushed tomatoes and put your pasta on the boil.
8. Boil the pasta for around 2 minutes less than instructed. Just before it is done, add a ladle of pasta water into the sauce. Drain the pasta and add it in too and take it off the heat.
9. With the pan off the heat, add in the egg mix and immediately stir to incorporate. Keep stirring to prevent the egg from scrambling.
10. Once the sauce has fully incorporated and thickened, serve into bowls and garnish with guanciale.