Italian Paccheri with Fava Beans, Red Prawns, Lemon Zest and Stracciatella | Paccheri con Favette, Gamberi Rossi, Scorza di Limone e Stracciatella
This is a spring plate and it lasts about six weeks. Favette are fava beans picked young, while the pod is still soft and the bean inside is sweet rather than floury, and once that window closes the dish cannot be made properly. Everything else is arranged around them: raw red prawns for sweetness and salt, stracciatella for cool milk fat, lemon zest for lift.
Two of the four main elements are not cooked at all. The prawns go in off the heat, the stracciatella goes onto the plate after the pasta, and the only real cooking is a short green cream made from part of the favette and the mantecatura that binds it to the pasta.
The temperature spread is the whole point. Warm pasta, barely warm prawns, cold cheese, and a scent of lemon that arrives before any of it. Serve this in a bowl that has been sitting in a hot cupboard and the stracciatella melts into the sauce, the prawns firm up and the plate becomes ordinary.
Yield: 4 first course servings. Prep: 40 minutes. Cook: 20 minutes. Total: about 1 hour. Difficulty: intermediate. Course: primo piatto. Season: April to early June.
The Story
Stracciatella is the youngest of the three principal ingredients and the one with a documented birth. It is the torn interior of burrata, strands of pasta filata soaked in cream, and it was invented in the countryside around Andria in Puglia at the turn of the twentieth century as a way of using up the scraps and the cream left over from mozzarella making. For decades it travelled no further than the province, because it lasts a day or two at most. Refrigerated transport is what put it on menus outside Puglia, which is why every dish built on it is modern.
The fava bean is the opposite: one of the oldest cultivated legumes in the Mediterranean, grown on the Murge plateau since antiquity and for centuries the protein of people who could not afford meat. Fave e cicoria, the Pugliese purée of dried favas with wild chicory, is the monument to that history. Eating them young and raw, as favette with a piece of pecorino, is still what happens in the countryside at the start of May.
Gambero rosso is the luxury of the three. The deep water red prawns landed at Mazara del Vallo in Sicily and at Gallipoli in Puglia are sweet enough to be eaten raw, and on that coast they usually are, dressed with nothing but oil and salt. Putting them into a hot pan is close to a waste of money. This dish lines up an ancient legume, a modern cheese and a raw prawn from the same sea, and lets the pasta carry all three.
Ingredients
For the fava cream
Fresh fava beans in the pod, 2 1/2 lb (1.15 kg), about 1 1/2 cups (250 g) shelled
Shallot, very finely minced, 1 small
Extra virgin olive oil, 2 tbsp (30 ml)
Dry white wine, 1/4 cup (60 ml)
Warm water or light vegetable stock, 1/4 cup (60 ml)
Fine sea salt, 1/2 tsp (3 g)
For the prawns
Mediterranean red prawns, very fresh, 12 large
Extra virgin olive oil, 2 tbsp (30 ml)
Fine sea salt, 1 small pinch
Finely grated zest of 1 unwaxed lemon, divided
For the pasta
Bronze drawn paccheri, 14 oz (400 g)
Coarse sea salt, 2 tbsp (36 g) for 5 quarts (4.7 litres) of pasta water
Dry white wine, 1/4 cup (60 ml)
Reserved pasta cooking water, about 1 1/2 cups (360 ml)
For finishing
Stracciatella, cold, 6 oz (170 g)
Flat leaf parsley, finely chopped, 1 tbsp
Extra virgin olive oil, mild and fruity, 2 tbsp (30 ml)
Freshly ground black pepper, to taste
Preparation
Shell and skin the favette
Pod the beans, then blanch them 60 seconds in salted boiling water and drop them straight into iced water. If the pale outer skin is thick enough to see, slip it off by pinching the bean at one end; young favette in the first weeks of the season may not need it. Set aside a third of the beans whole for the finish and keep the rest for the cream. This is the slowest job in the recipe, so do it first.
Clean the prawns
Pull the heads off and set them aside. Peel the tails, leaving the last segment on if you like the look of it, and lift out the dark intestinal vein with the point of a knife. Chop eight tails into pieces roughly the size of a fava bean and leave four whole for the top of the plate. Cover them and return them to the refrigerator: until service they are not to be warmed.
Draw the flavour from the heads
Press the reserved heads firmly in a small pan with 1 tablespoon of olive oil over low heat for about 2 minutes, crushing them with the back of a spoon so the orange juices run out. Do not brown them. Strain the oil through a fine sieve into a small bowl and discard the heads. It is a minute of work and it gives the sauce a depth that raw tails alone never supply.
Build the fava cream
Soften the shallot in 2 tablespoons of olive oil over low heat until translucent but not coloured, about 4 minutes. Add the two thirds of the favette reserved for the cream, cook 1 minute, pour in the white wine and let it reduce almost to nothing. Add the warm water, season with the fine salt and blend until completely smooth. Keep it loose: it should pour from the spoon, not sit on it.
Salt the water and cook the paccheri
Bring 5 quarts (4.7 litres) of water to a rolling boil and add the coarse salt. Keep the seasoning moderate, because stracciatella and prawns both bring salt of their own to the finished plate. Slide the paccheri in and cook them 2 to 3 minutes short of the packet time. Reserve 1 1/2 cups (360 ml) of the water first, and lift them with a spider so the liquid inside each tube goes to the pan with them.
Mantecatura in the fava cream
Warm a wide skillet with the strained prawn oil, add the remaining white wine and let it reduce by half. Stir in the fava cream, loosen it with a ladle of pasta water and add the paccheri. Finish cooking for about 2 minutes over medium heat, turning the tubes rather than tossing them and adding pasta water a little at a time. Watch the colour: the cream should stay green, which it will as long as the pan never boils hard.
Prawns, zest and off the heat
In the last 30 to 45 seconds add the chopped prawns and the whole favette you set aside, then take the pan off the heat entirely. Stir in the parsley, half the lemon zest and a spoonful of raw olive oil. The residual heat is all the prawns need. Season the four whole prawns with a little oil, salt and zest and leave them raw, or give them 10 seconds a side in a dry hot pan.
Plating
Use shallow bowls at room temperature or only just warm. This is the single most common plating error with this dish: a properly hot bowl, correct for almost any other pasta, melts the stracciatella within seconds and collapses the contrast the whole plate is built on.
Lay the paccheri down loosely rather than in a mound, so some whole favette and pieces of prawn stay visible between the tubes. Add the stracciatella in three or four small spoonfuls around and between the pasta, never in one central heap and never stirred through. Set one whole prawn on each portion, grate the remaining lemon zest over the plate from a height so it lands evenly, finish with black pepper and a thread of fruity olive oil, and take it to the table at once.
Professional Technique
The defining technique is building a sauce that is creamy without any cream in it. The fava cream supplies a vegetable purée thickened by the bean starch, the pasta water supplies free starch, and the olive oil supplies the fat. Agitation in the pan brings the three into an emulsion, which is why the paccheri have to finish their cooking in the skillet rather than arriving fully cooked from the pot. Take the pasta out too late and there is no starch left to give, and no amount of stirring will build a coating.
The second is heat management for the prawns, and it is subtractive rather than additive. Red prawn flesh begins to set at around 120°F (49°C) and turns firm and mealy well before the temperature most cooks are working at. Adding them in the last 30 seconds and then pulling the pan off the heat carries them from cold to barely warm on a falling temperature, not a rising one.
The third is the treatment of the stracciatella, which is technically a suspension of pasta filata strands in cream and behaves badly under heat. Above roughly 105°F (40°C) the strands relax and release their cream, and what was a distinct cool element becomes a greasy film through the sauce. Keeping it out of the pan is not a garnishing preference, it is the only way it survives to the table intact.
Texture and Moisture Control
There are four textures to protect and they fail in different directions. The paccheri should be firm at the centre, the fava cream loose enough to move, the prawns yielding and slightly translucent, the stracciatella cool and stringy. The cream is the one most often got wrong: blended too thick, or reduced too far in the pan, it coats the pasta like a paste and the dish turns heavy and dull green.
Keep the cream visibly looser than you want the finished sauce, because large tubes absorb liquid fast in the last two minutes. Add pasta water a few tablespoons at a time and judge by movement rather than appearance: tilt the pan and the paccheri should slide through a glossy coating with no watery trail. If it is loose, keep the pasta moving for a few seconds more, but do that before the prawns go in, because once they are in there is no time left for reduction.
Colour is part of texture here. Fava purée dulls from bright green to olive when it is held hot or cooked hard, and the plate loses half its appeal before anyone tastes it. Blend the cream shortly before service, keep the pan below a hard simmer and do not hold the finished sauce warm for more than a few minutes.
Professional Mise en Place
Podding and skinning the favette is most of the work and all of it can be done early. The finish takes about four minutes and leaves no room for preparation.
Equipment and tools
Blender or small food processor for the fava cream
Wide skillet large enough to hold the paccheri in a single layer
Fine sieve for the prawn head oil, and a small bowl to catch it
Spider skimmer, rubber spatula, microplane for the zest
Prepared ahead
Favette podded, blanched and skinned, same day, kept covered and cold
Prawn head oil, strained, up to 4 hours ahead at cool room temperature
Fava cream, up to 3 hours ahead, kept cold and blended again briefly if it sets
Prawns cleaned and portioned, kept on a cold tray over ice
Service setup
Stracciatella out of its liquid and draining in a sieve, cold
Lemon zested to order, not in advance, and parsley chopped at the last minute
Pasta water at a rolling boil, reserved water ready in a jug beside the pan
Bowls at room temperature, never warmed
Chef Tips
Buy the favette in the pod and buy far more than the weight you need. The yield is roughly one part bean to four parts pod, and it drops again once the skins come off: 2 1/2 lb (1.15 kg) in the bag is about 1 1/2 cups (250 g) on the board.
Taste one raw bean before you do anything. If it is sweet and tender, skip the skinning for the whole beans you are keeping for the finish and enjoy the texture. If it tastes starchy or the skin is tough between the teeth, skin every one of them, including the ones going into the cream.
Zest the lemon over the plate, not into a bowl. The aromatic oils in the peel are volatile and most are lost within a minute of grating, which is why the zest that went into the pan does a different job from the zest that lands on the finished plate.
If you cannot get stracciatella, tear the inside out of a fresh burrata. Do not substitute mozzarella, which will not string or carry cream, and not ricotta, which is sweet and granular.
Common Mistakes
Cooking the stracciatella. Stirred into the pan it releases its cream, coats everything in a greasy film and disappears as an ingredient. It belongs on the plate after the pasta, in small spoonfuls.
Using hot bowls. A properly warmed bowl, right for almost any other pasta, melts the cheese in seconds and destroys the temperature contrast. Room temperature bowls, always.
Overcooking the prawns. Red prawns set at a lower temperature than most shellfish and go firm and mealy quickly. Thirty seconds in a pan already off the heat is enough, and raw is a legitimate option.
Making the fava cream too thick. A dense purée turns the sauce into paste and the pasta cannot move through it. It should pour from the spoon before the paccheri ever go in.
Using lemon juice instead of zest. Juice brings sharp acidity that curdles the look of the stracciatella and flattens the sweetness of the prawns. The perfume you want is in the peel.
Skipping the prawn heads. Two minutes of pressing them in warm oil is where the sauce gets its depth. Thrown away, the dish tastes only of fava bean and lemon.
Wine Pairing
Martina Franca DOC: The Pugliese white from the Valle d'Itria, a short drive from where stracciatella was invented, and the most local answer on the list. Verdeca gives it a pale, dry, faintly herbal character with low aromatic weight, which is exactly right for a plate that must not be overwhelmed. It also carries a mineral finish that picks up the salinity of the raw prawn.
Fiano di Avellino DOCG: Fiano has a waxy texture and a hazelnut note under the citrus that meets fresh dairy particularly well, and enough acidity to keep the fat of the stracciatella from settling on the palate. Drink it young for this dish, at around 52°F (11°C), where the pear and lemon fruit is still forward and the wine has not yet turned savoury with age.
Ribolla Gialla Collio DOC: A northern choice, and the one that flatters the lemon most directly. Ribolla Gialla is high in acid, light in body and almost green in its citrus profile, so it sits beside the zest rather than competing with it. The absence of oak matters here: any barrel character would coat the prawns and blunt them.
Lugana DOC: Turbiana grown on the clay around Lake Garda gives a white with unusual density for its acidity, which is useful when a sauce has body but no cream. It has the weight to sit under the fava purée and a bitter almond finish that echoes the vegetal edge of the beans, without adding fruit sweetness to a plate that already has two sweet elements.
Alta Langa DOCG: The Piedmontese metodo classico, always vintage and always at least thirty months on the lees. The fine bead scrubs dairy fat from the palate between forkfuls, and the toasted lees character gives the raw prawn something to lean on. Choose a brut rather than a pas dosé, since a trace of sugar softens the acidity against the favette.
Storage & Reheating
This plate is made to be eaten immediately and it does not improve in any container. The components keep a little. Skinned favette hold 2 days refrigerated in a sealed box, the fava cream 1 day, the prawn head oil 2 days in a small jar. Stracciatella keeps 2 days at most and is best the day it is bought. Raw prawns should be used within 24 hours and never refrozen.
Finished pasta keeps 1 day, refrigerated in an airtight container, with any remaining stracciatella stored separately. Reheat in a wide pan over low heat with 2 tablespoons of water, turning gently for 2 minutes, and add fresh cheese only once the pan is off the heat. Do not use a microwave, which cooks the prawn pieces through, and do not freeze the dish: fava purée turns grainy on thawing and cooked paccheri go mealy.
Nutrition
Per serving, based on 4 first course portions:
Calories: 690 kcal
Total Fat: 27 g
Saturated Fat: 9 g
Trans Fat: 0 g
Unsaturated Fat: 16 g
Cholesterol: 150 mg
Sodium: 720 mg
Total Carbohydrates: 82 g
Fiber: 9 g
Total Sugars: 6 g
Added Sugars: 0 g
Protein: 35 g
Lactose: 2.5 g
Principal micronutrients: folate, manganese, iodine, vitamin C, calcium, phosphorus, vitamin B12
These figures are estimates. Most of the salt in the pasta water is discarded, and the fat varies with how generous the stracciatella portion is.
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