Bigoli con Salsa Recipe for a Venetian Pasta with Onion and Anchovy Sauce

This bigoli con salsa recipe hails from Venice and is made with wholewheat pasta and a sweet caramelised onion and anchovy sauce, and is sprinkled liberally with parsley. Distinguished by quintessential Venetian flavours, it’s a classic Venetian pasta dish that is deceptively simple and decidedly delicious. This bigoli con salsa recipe is our Venice edition of The Dish.

There are many dishes in Venice that I could have made for our series ‘The Dish’, a collection of recipes for the quintessential plates of places we’re travelling to on our yearlong global grand tour dedicated to slow, local and experiential travel this year. Sarde in soar (a type of marinated ‘sweet and sour’ sardines) and spaghetti con vongole (spaghetti with clams) are just a couple of them.

However, many of Venice’s traditional dishes are either specifically tied to local varieties of seafood that aren’t available anywhere else or are dishes that won’t please a lot of palates, such as Venice’s famous liver dish. As we want you to be able to make the dishes we’re sharing from our travels this year at home, there was no point sharing dishes so rooted in the place that they can’t be made elsewhere.

Instead, I’ve opted for something more practical that is deceptively simple and decidedly delicious: this bigoli con salsa recipe for a coarse wholewheat pasta with a sweet caramelised onion and anchovy sauce, sprinkled liberally with parsley. It’s quickly become one of our favourite Venetian dishes and one of our best pasta recipes.

Bigoli con Salsa Recipe for a Venetian Pasta with Onion and Anchovy Sauce

This bigoli con salsa recipe could not be simpler. But as Francesco, the owner of Antiche Carampane, our favourite Venetian restaurant, told us when we sought his advice on what I should make from Venice for our series The Dish, on the quintessential dishes of places: “It’s the salty seafood taste of the anchovies combined with the sweetness of the onions that make bigoli con salsa so special.”

Bigoli con salsa is most certainly a local specialty, too. There isn’t a chef worth their salt in Venice who can’t make this dish. And while you won’t see it on every menu*, you can just do what we did at a couple of favourite restaurants, such as Vini da Gigio, and just ask for it and they’ll make it for you.

Tips to Making this Bigoli con Salsa Recipe

Just a few tips to making this bigoli con salsa recipe, beginning with the key ingredient, the pasta.

The Pasta

For bigoli con salsa, the pasta is all important. Originally made with duck eggs and buckwheat flour, these days bigoli is made with wholewheat flour and chicken eggs.

The dough is pressed through a mechanism not dissimilar to a meat grinder, instead of being put through a pasta machine. In fact, a meat grinder is what Mario Batali ingeniously recommends at his Babbo restaurant recipe for bigoli con salsa.

You can, however, buy a modern pasta extruder or simply buy dried bigoli, such as the brand in my image above, made in nearby Bassano. We bought that at our local supermarket in Venice but you should be able to find bigoli at specialist Italian food shops and delis.

Why is the pasta so important? Every pasta in Italy is shaped to serve a purpose, and in this case the pasta has a spaghetti-like length and shape, but with a coarse rather than smooth exterior.

The texture of this pasta allows more sauce to stick to the pasta, so the pasta is generally used when you have a pasta sauce with a gravy-like consistency. You’ll find bigoli used throughout the Veneto region, with a duck or asino (donkey) sauce, particularly in Verona.

Anchovy and Onion Sauce

You want cured anchovies not fresh anchovies, so look for canned anchovies or anchovy fillets in a jar, and one medium sized red onion. That’s it.

After eating a sublime plate of bigoli con salsa at Vini da Gigio, we asked the waitress exactly what they put in their sauce. “Olive oil, anchovies, onion, parsley, and seasoning,” she said. That’s all. Brilliant.

And for those who turn up their nose at anchovies, taste the dish first, you’ll be surprised at how subtle the anchovy taste is. Yet it’s that salty-fishy and sweet combination that makes the dish work.

To Serve

After mixing through most of the fresh parsley at the end, sprinkle on a little more parsley after plating, and serve with crusty Italian bread to mop up any remaining sauce.

I know I’ve said this already, but this dish is amazingly simple, which is another reason I’ve chosen it: it’s a fantastic dish to make for those nights at home in your palazzo apartment in Venice, when, exhausted after a day traipsing around the Accademia, you just want to stay in and cook something simple to sip with a bottle of Soave.

* A quick note on the name: when we were in Venice in the spring of 2010 this dish appeared on menus at our favourite Venetian restaurants as ‘bigoli con salsa’, which is also what it was called by Venetian chefs and restaurant owners we chatted to while researching and recipe-testing the dish. Search for the recipe these days, which, incidentally, wasn’t online when we first shared it, and you’ll see it called ‘bigoli in salsa’ or ‘bigoli con la salsa’. We’re not here to please the Google gods, so we’re sticking with the original title for now.

Bigoli con Salsa Recipe for a Classic Venetian Pasta

Bigoli con Salsa Recipe

AuthorTerence Carter

This is a deceptively simple and decidedly delicious dish, but the pasta is very important — you must use Bigoli.

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Prep Time 5 minutes mins

Cook Time 20 minutes mins

Total Time 25 minutes mins

Course Main

Cuisine Italian

Servings made with recipeServings 2

Calories 268 kcal

Equipment

10 Inch Hybrid Nonstick Frying Pan

Stock Pot

Ingredients

 

MetricUS Customary

 

1x2x3x

• 250 g Bigoli pasta
• 4 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil
• 8 anchovy fillets
• 1 medium red onion - chopped finely
• 1 good bunch of Italian parsley - chopped finely
• Salt and pepper

Instructions

 

• Bring a large pot of water to the boil for the pasta. Add a tablespoon of good salt.
• In a large sauté pan over low-medium heat, add the olive oil, the anchovies and the onion.
• Stir the mix, helping to break down the anchovies. This should take around 10 minutes.
• When you have a thick gravy, the sauce is ready, so put your pasta on.
• When the pasta is al dente, drain it and add it to the sauce. Mix through most of the parsley and serve. Add a little parsley on top to make it pretty. Season and add more olive oil if you wish and enjoy with a medium to full bodied white wine.

Nutrition

Calories: 268kcalProtein: 3gFat: 29gSaturated Fat: 4gCholesterol: 10mgSodium: 17mgPotassium: 61mgCalcium: 24mgIron: 0.7mg

Please do let us know in the comments below if you make this Venetian bigoli con salsa recipe as we’d love to know how it turns out for you.