Sausage Mushroom Pasta Recipe to Celebrate the Wild Mushroom Season

This sausage mushroom pasta recipe is inspired by the popular pasta dishes of Calabria’s mountain town of Camigliatello Silano, Southern Italy’s wild mushroom capital. There, dishes are made with spicy Calabrian sausages and local porcini or another earthy wild mushroom. We use meaty shiitake mushrooms, piquant Italian sausages, chilli flakes and celery leaves, which bring freshness.

It’s wild mushroom season in Camigliatello Silano in Calabria, Italy’s southernmost mainland region, where the annual October mushroom festival, Sagra del Fungo, is underway until early November. This time every year, no matter where we are in the world, I find myself dreaming of Calabria, its wonderful food, and wild mushrooms – and cooking mushroom dishes at home. That explains why I’m sharing two Calabria-inspired pasta recipes within a week.

This quick and easy sausage mushroom pasta recipe is inspired by the delicious mushroom pasta dishes we savoured in Southern Italy’s wild mushroom capital, Camigliatello Silano – a place we spent an all-too-brief but glorious time on our months-long road trip researching and writing a Calabria guidebook, and falling in love with Calabrian food. It’s quickly become one of our best mushroom recipes.

The other Calabrian inspired dish that I recently shared is this spicy Italian sausage pasta recipe, easily one of our best pasta recipes, which makes a rich, spicy, tomato-based sauce traditionally made with Calabria’s famously fiery spreadable pork sausage paste called ’nduja, red onions from Tropea, and peperoncino Calabrese or Calabrian chilli peppers from Diamante.

Before I tell you more about this Calabrian inspired sausage mushroom pasta recipe, I have a favour to ask. Grantourismo is reader-supported. If you’ve cooked our recipes and enjoyed them, please consider supporting Grantourismo. You could buy a handcrafted KROK, the best mortar and pestle ever, or buy something on Amazon, such as these cookbooks for culinary travellers or classic cookbooks for serious cooks.

Now let me tell you more about our Southern Italian inspired sausage mushroom pasta recipe.

Sausage Mushroom Pasta Recipe to Celebrate the Wild Mushroom Season

Before I share some tips to making this sausage mushroom pasta recipe, I want to tell you a bit more about Camigliatello Silano and its mouthwatering local products. If you haven’t been to Camigliatello Silano, like many Italian towns, alimentari or small goods shops selling prodotti tipici or typical specialties dot the streets.

Just like Diamante, which I told you about in the spicy Italian sausage pasta recipe, where the alimentari sell a mind-boggling array of peperoncino products, from dried chillies to spicy chilli relishes, in Camigliatello Silano, glass deli counters brim with delicious local specialties, from stretchy cheeses to spicy soppressata, while air-dried pork legs hang from the ceilings.

The stretchy cheeses are a specialty of Camigliatello Silano. Called Caciocavallo Silano DOP, they are a semi-hard, stringy, aged cheese made from cow’s milk, with a long history of being produced in the area. When the cheese is young it’s creamy and sweet, but as it ages it becomes harder and salty. It’s often eaten grilled with another local specialty, potatoes.

But it’s the pork and mushrooms for which Camigliatello Silano is most famous. There are probably just as many pork products as there are mushroom products: all different kinds of cured meats, including pancetta and guanciale in many forms, spicy salamis such as capocollo (pork neck salami), and fantastic hams and fresh sausages – reason enough to settle into an apartment with kitchen in Camigliatello Silano for a while.

The reason for the abundance of pork products is Camigliatello Silano’s prized Calabrian black pigs, called suino nero in Italian. If you drive through the area during the warmer months, especially in spring, you’ll probably spot them feasting on the fresh grasses under glorious blue skies in the pristine mountain air. We’ve never inhaled air as fresh as we have in the Sila Mountains.

And of course, there are mushroom products galore in Camigliatello Silano: packets of dried porcini (porcino is singular, porcini is plural), which are the local favourite of all the wild mushrooms (funghi) and jars of porcini pastes, porcini mushroom cream (crema funghi porcini), and porcini in extra virgin olive oil with garlic, chilli peppers, and herbs and spices, and so much more.

The menu at every restaurant, taverna, enoteca, and pizzeria in Camigliatello Silano features dishes with mushrooms – from mushroom antipasti and mushroom soups to mushroom pizzas and mushroom pastas. There are also heavenly truffles, generously shaved onto everything from handmade pasta to rustic potatoes.

So it shouldn’t be a surprise that it was in Camigliatello Silano that we savoured the most addictively delicious and most divine mushrooms we’ve ever tasted in our lives, the most heavenly of which were served during a mushroom degustation menu – peppered with truffles, of course – featuring an enormous whole roasted mushroom as the star attraction.

Until that meal, I could never have imagined being satisfied with a main course that consisted of a single gigantic mushroom, roasted to perfection, with the only seasoning being quality salt, freshly ground cracked black pepper, and extra virgin olive oil. But that meal changed our lives. And the memory of it inspired this sausage mushroom pasta recipe.

Tips to Making this Sausage Mushroom Pasta Recipe

Here are some tips to making this sausage mushroom pasta recipe, because like a lot of Italian home cooking from the mountains and countryside, the process isn’t complicated, it’s all about quality ingredients and seasoning. If you regularly cook Italian food, you can probably scroll straight to the recipe.

Sausages

If you were in Calabria, I’d be recommending you buy some of the wonderful spicy sausages made from those big Calabrian black pigs. I’ve used the same fresh skinless spicy Italian sausages made by a European butcher here that I used for my Calabrian spicy sausage pasta recipe (link above).

Can’t find spicy Calabrian sausages at your supermarket? A good local butcher should be able to make you some spicy sausages with dried chillies with a few days notice. Otherwise, use whatever spicy sausages or Italian style sausages you can source and dried chilli flakes for a kick of heat. If you can’t find skinless sausages, buy fresh sausages and just remove the sausage casings.

With the skinless sausages, sometimes I’ll chop them up on a cutting board then once in the pan, I’ll use a wooden spoon or a fork to further break the sausage meat down. I wouldn’t recommend using a fork in your favourite pans. I’ve also been breaking the sausage meat up with my hands over the pan for more crumbly sausage meat.

My sausage mushroom pasta recipe calls for you to brown the sausage and then after transferring the cooked sausage meat to a plate, deglaze the pan with half a cup of wine (or water), using a wooden spoon or spatula to scrape the browned caramelised bits of sausage from the bottom and sides of the pan. I then pour that liquid into a small bowl and use it to cook the mushrooms.

I’m going to qualify this step: if your sausage meat hasn’t stuck to the bottom and sides of the pan, because you haven’t browned it as much as I like to, then you can skip the deglazing step and simply add the mushrooms to the sausage meat. In that case, you’ll probably want to add a couple more glugs of olive oil to the pan.

If you do have crispy brown bits of sausage encrusted on the pan but don’t want to deglaze with wine, simply use water or a stock. In fact, with water or stok, you’ll end up with more of a spicy liquid to cook your mushrooms in, as, due to the alcohol, much of the wine evaporates during deglazing.

Mushrooms

If you were in Camigliatello Silano, you wouldn’t need my encouragement to buy some local porcini for this recipe, as it’s available everywhere. If you were there during the autumn mushroom festival, you’d be buying just-foraged porcini or other wild mushrooms from the stalls lining the main street.

You might even have been lucky enough to have accompanied a local chef on a wild mushroom foraging expedition and be cooking your own foraged mushrooms with those wonderful fresh spicy sausages made from those big beautiful Calabrian black pigs.

But if you’re like us and not in Southern Italy right now, try to get hold of porcini and if you can’t, do as my sausage mushroom pasta recipe calls for and use shiitake mushrooms or any earthy meaty mushrooms that you can source where you live. We use shiitake because we love them, they’re readily available here and they’re affordable.

I like to slice the mushrooms through their tops and stalks to keep the outline of the mushroom, and slice them about 1cm in thickness so even when the mushroom exteriors are brown the insides are white and juicy. A lot of Italian cooks chop the mushrooms into much smaller pieces.

Pasta

In Camigliatello Silano, various types of pasta are used with their mushroom and sausage dishes, both fresh pasta and dried pasta. My sausage mushroom pasta recipe calls for a dried pasta called spaghettoni, which is thicker than the largest spaghetti and holds up well. But you could use tagliatelle.

Follow the packet instructions for cooking your pasta, which is probably around ten minutes or so, but cook it just before it’s al dente – perhaps a minute or two less, depending on how much bite you like in your pasta.

This is because you’re going to do as the Italians do, and use a pronged pasta spoon or tongs to transfer the pasta directly to the pan, rather than serve the sausage and mushrooms on top of the pasta. This ensures there are mushrooms and sausages through the pasta. Don’t forget to add 2-3 tablespoons of pasta water as it helps everything cling to the pasta.

Herbs, Seasoning and Olive Oil

Italians would probably use flat leaf parsley with a dish like this, but I love the freshness of flavour that roughly chopped celery leaves brings. A sprinkle of chilli flakes and salt add even more flavour; don’t necessarily follow my measures; always taste and adjust the seasoning to suit your palate.

Finish with a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil – the best quality you can afford – and a few grinds of cracked black pepper, and serve with grated Parmigiano Reggiano or Pecorino Romano. Some Italian chefs would say that a spicy pasta that’s rich in umami doesn’t need cheese, but you tell me what you think.

A pasta dish in Italy is a primi or first course. If you follow that Italian tradition, our sausage mushroom pasta recipe will easily feed four people. If you’re serving this dish as a hearty main course, you’ll get two very generous portions, so use big bowls.

Sausage Mushroom Pasta Recipe

Sausage Mushroom Pasta Recipe to Celebrate the Wild Mushroom Season

AuthorLara Dunston

This sausage mushroom pasta recipe is based on the popular pasta dishes of Calabria’s alpine mountain town of Camigliatello Silano, Southern Italy’s wild mushroom capital. There the dishes are typically made with spicy Calabrian sausages and local porcini or another earthy wild mushroom. We use meaty shiitake mushrooms, piquant Italian sausages, chilli flakes, and celery leaves, which bring freshness.

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Prep Time 10 minutes mins

Cook Time 20 minutes mins

Course First Course, Main Course, Pasta Course

Cuisine Italian

Servings made with recipeServings 2

Calories 1099 kcal

Ingredients

 

MetricUS Customary

 

1x2x3x

• 4 tbsp olive oil - divided
• 2 garlic cloves - crushed
• 150 g spicy Italian sausage - skinless or meat removed from skin
• 250 g shiitake mushrooms - brushed clean, sliced
• 1 cup wine or water
• 200 g spaghettoni or linguine
• 2 tbsp celery leaves or flat leaf parsley - roughly chopped
• ½ tsp chilli flakes
• ½ tsp salt - or to taste
• 1 tbsp extra virgin olive oil

Instructions

 

• Put a large pot of water on to boil.
• In a large fry pan over medium-high, heat 2 tablespoons of olive oil until shimmering then fry the crushed garlic cloves for a minute or two.
• Reduce the heat to medium, pull the skinless spicy Italian sausage meat apart with your hands into small rough pieces and add it to the pan, using a fork if needed to further break the meat down a little, and fry the sausage for five minutes or so until brown. Transfer the cooked sausage meat to a plate.
• Deglaze the pan with half a cup of wine (or water), using a wooden spoon or spatula to scrape the browned caramelised bits of pork from the bottom and sides of the pan, then pour that liquid into a small bowl.
• Heat the remaining olive oil, add the mushrooms and stir continuously so they cook evenly. When the mushrooms have soaked up the olive oil, add a little pan liquid, continuing to stir the mushrooms, adding liquid as needed. When the mushrooms are brown, return the sausage, add the remaining liquid, stir to combine well, and reduce heat to low.
• When the water is boiling, add a pinch of salt and the pasta, put the lid on, and cook according to the pasta instructions, around ten minutes, until al dente. Using a pronged pasta spoon or tongs, transfer the pasta directly to the pan, including a few tablespoons of pasta water.
• Add the roughly chopped celery leaves, chilli flakes and salt, stir to incorporate, taste, adjust seasoning if needed, and distribute between plates.
• Finish with a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil, a few grinds of cracked black pepper, and serve with grated Parmigiano Reggiano or Pecorino Romano.

Notes

To serve: ground black pepper, grated Parmigiano Reggiano or Pecorino Romano cheese, more extra virgin olive oil

Nutrition

Calories: 1099kcalCarbohydrates: 89gProtein: 27gFat: 61gSaturated Fat: 14gPolyunsaturated Fat: 7gMonounsaturated Fat: 37gCholesterol: 57mgSodium: 1173mgPotassium: 963mgFiber: 7gSugar: 7gVitamin A: 492IUVitamin C: 8mgCalcium: 61mgIron: 4mg

Please do let us know in the comments below if you make our sausage mushroom pasta recipe as we love hearing how our recipes turn out for readers.