Amalfi Mood: Your New Favorite 20 Minute Lemony Summer Pasta
Straight from the Amalfi Coast and the legendary Peppe Guida, plus a Sorrento peninsula honeymoon and how to adapt this recipe where you are!
Ciao friends!
Do you ever get frustrated that your ingredients may not measure up to the intense flavors of Italian-grown ingredients? I hear this a lot. Italy is truly blessed with a unique combination of soil, sea, sun, and climate for growing. But nevermind. The most iconic of Italian ingredients is blissfully flavourful where you live too, so I promise, this pasta will not disappoint.
We’re currently on summer break from Lake Como, vacationing at my mom’s retirement home in NW Indiana. It’s like a reverse tourist commute! While we usually load a suitcase full of Italian cheeses and pastas to haul with us when we travel to the US, this summer, June completely swamped me, so we left without so much as a vacuum-packed parmigiano reggiano. Nevertheless, we still have our usual cravings for Italian summer and good pasta.
So I challenged myself to recreate a pasta dish with the most iconic of all Italian ingredients - the intensely mild and sweet Amalfi lemon - using all US supermarket ingredients. My ever-faithful taste-tester, my son, Matteo, slurped it down with his review “WOW! This is really good!!”
The result: a very weeknight friendly, 20-minute creamy lemony summer pasta which will have you dreaming of bright fuchsia-shaded Bougainville and trees dripping heavy with sun-ripened lemons to the sound of the Mediterranean crashing into precipitous cliffs. Jump ahead to the recipe or stick around for some photos of a long ago Amalfi Coast honeymoon and a little more about Peppe Guida.
The Amalfi Coast
I don’t think I knew anything about Amalfi lemons before I moved to Italy. It was October 2010 and I was several months pregnant. We’d eloped at the courthouse in southern Manhattan and never had a honeymoon. An off-season trip to the sea and southern Italy sounded perfect.
Pregnancy didn’t agree with me; the baby was fine but I slept anywhere and everywhere like a narcoleptic. And so I slept most of the car journey from Como and woke up as we were entering a parking lot in Positano. We shopped for citrus fruits, collected some colorful ceramics, leisurely visited a new town each day, Sorrento, Amalfi, Ravello, Positano, and the Island of Capri. Highlights: I fell asleep at the table after the secondo at the Michelin-starred Don Alfonso and we witnessed the arrival of a Madonna statue by boat and her procession to the Duomo of Amalfi. We came home loaded with bags of bright yellow lemons and melon-sized citron, green and swollen like limes on steroids.
Amalfi Lemons 🍋🍋🍋
What’s so special about these lemons? Three things:
physically, they are very large and extra juicy with few seeds
their taste is unusually mild and very sweet
the whole lemon can be eaten raw, rind and all. You’ll see Peppe Guida and his daughter do just this in Chef’s Table.
These three qualities make Amalfi lemons cherished by chefs and home cooks alike. Their perfume is unforgettably intoxicating, sweeter and stronger than an ordinary lemon. Peppe Guida is from Vico Equense, a village on the Sorrento Peninsula that faces the sea and is known for its lemons and strong culinary tradition; this and his mamma’s kitchen there are his influences.
The Pope of Pasta
You may know Peppe Guida from the Netflix show, Chef’s Table: Noodles or from his Michelin star restaurant, Antica Osteria Nonna Rosa or Villa Rosa in Campania, Italy. Unlike most Italian chefs who laud pasta fresca or fresh pasta, as the most sophisticated category of pasta, Pepe celebrates pasta secca or dried pasta, strongly believing it is not at all just a dish for the poor. His menus reflect this home cooking style. Giuseppe Di Martino, owner of Pastificio di Martino, has nicknamed his friend, Pepe Guido, “the pope of pasta”.
“Dry pasta is a very humble dish. But if you make it with care and aim to make something extraordinary, even spaghetti with garlic and oil becomes a dish fit for a king.”
“La pasta secca è un piatto umilissimo. Ma se glielo fai come veniva fatto, con il pensiero di fare qualcosa di straordinario, anche uno spaghetto aglio olio diventa un piatto del rè. - PG
Spaghettini al limone aka small spaghetti with lemon is one of Peppe’s most famous dishes. While his traditional recipe calls for infusing the pasta water with lemon overnight, I based this recipe off his shorter version for Gambero Rosso (below). Peppe infuses the pasta water with the essential oils and sweet juices of the lemon and then cooks it “minestra” style.
This brilliant recipe showcases the best of Italian home cooking: with a few simple ingredients, you can make a very special dish.
“Skillet spaghetti”
People were recently freaking out about Meghan Dutchess of Sussex boiling pasta in flavoured skillet water; she called it “skillet spaghetti".” However, this technique of cooking the spaghetti in little, infused water, similar to a minestra (Italian soup), is something that’s done in Italy. Her method was controversial and bashed all over social media, but shouldn’t have been. Several traditional spaghetti dishes are made in the skillet - including this one - as well as the popular spaghetti all’assassina.
Tips
Lemons: If you can get Amalfi lemons, use them. Sometimes they are available outside of Italy and Europe. Meyer lemons are the next most similar lemon. However, you can make this pasta with any untreated lemon, and preferably organic. “Untreated” lemons are important because the oils from the lemon rind with dissolve and infuse into the pasta water. You don’t want to eat any nasty pesticides
Provolone: Peppe’s recipe calls for mild provolone. While the local upscale supermarket had a fab cheese section and several kinds of smoked provolone, it would have overpowered the lemon. So I took a risk and bought the Bell Gioioso brand four cheeses grated mix of Asiago, Fontina, Parmesan, and Provolone (see photo below). All are quite melty mild cheeses. It worked a trick! I suspect just mild provolone alone results in a more smooth sauce but I’ll have to wait to try til I’m back home in Como.
Pasta water: Though Pepe’s quick recipe called for a set quantity of pasta water, you’ll likely need to add more boiling water from a kettle as the pasta cooks. I recommend having more boiling water on hand for this but it’s hard to say precisely how much! The amount will depend on many unpredictable factors like your heat source - gas, electric, or induction - and the temperature. My mom doesn’t cook much in the retirement home nor does she have more than 1 pan, so I lived on the edge and made this recipe in her large electric skillet (!!)
Pasta: Choose “thin spaghetti” that cooks in 6-7 minutes. See the Barilla pasta box above. We typically eat the thicker spaghetti that cooks in 10-12 minutes, but cooking in little water could be too starchy, possibly gooey. Angel hair pasta is thinner and a possible substitute, but might be too thin to hold up to the provolone. Let me know if you try it!
Skillet: needs to be wide enough for spaghettini to lay flat when uncooked
Lemon leaves: the original recipe calls for dried lemon leaves to be sprinkled atop the spaghetti. Lemons frequently come with leaves attached in Italy, they don’t in Indiana, so I tragically had to skip this step!
Let’s kick off Italian summer right, with this creamy, lemony Amalfi pasta dream.
pst! Scroll to the very bottom to download recipe pdf!
Small spaghetti with lemon by Peppe Guida
Spaghettini al limone di Peppe Guida
FOR 4 PEOPLE
The ingredients
4 untreated, organic lemons (see Tips above 🍋)
700 mL water (plus extra that is boiling on the side)
salt
1 tsp extra-virgin olive oil
130 g grated mild provolone or use the Bell Gioioso 4 cheese mix (see Tips above!)
400g small spaghetti aka spaghettini which cooks in 6-7 minutes
Optional: freshly ground pepper, to taste
The method
1) Pour the water into a wide skillet. Add the grated lemon rind of all 4 lemons and juice of 2 lemons to the water. Add a small sprinkle of salt. (Note: We are not going to make it salty like the sea, because this is a different way of cooking the pasta than usual. We don’t want it too salty.)
2) Turn heat to high and bring lemon water to a boil.
3) Add spaghettini to the skillet so it lays flat with the olive oil. Gently shake the skillet to separate it. Turn down the heat so it’s quietly bubbling. We don’t want the water to evaporate too fast.
4) When the spaghettini starts to bend and become soft, then you can begin to stir it gently until it is done cooking. If the water is going away and the pasta isn’t cooked yet, add small amounts of boiling water with a spoon, repeating until until the pasta is done and water is nearly absorbed but there is some left.
5) Remove from heat. Add provolone or cheese mixture and stir to melt and coat the pasta. Add a little boiling water to make the sauce if you didn’t have enough.
6) Taste for salt and add if needed. Add freshly ground pepper and a little more grated lemon rind if desired.
Notes:
This is Peppe’s written recipe on his site for the long traditional version. Grazie mille, Peppe! 💛
And here is Peppe’s simple YouTube recipe video
Buon appetito!
x Lolly
Thank you so much for sharing @Bernardette Hernández 🥰
Ummm this sounds so good but I will have to improvise - fresh pasta and the only cheese I have is mozzarella, feta, Parmesan and cheddar. Mozzarella and feta are both homemade so maybe I’ll stick with them and I can either use Meyer lemons or bush lemons (or both) I’m in Australia. Thank you 🙏