Deep-fried courgette pasta with burrata, basil & walnuts

Stanley Tucci's favourite pasta, pimped!

‘If it’s good enough for Stanley, it’s good enough for me’ is not an uncommon phrase in our house, or yours I imagine, if you watched Stanley Tucci: Searching For Italy. When he waxed lyrical about a seemingly basic pasta dish with courgettes, butter and parmesan, it didn’t take long for us to start road-testing a recipe - for research purposes, obviously. I won’t lie: spaghetti alla nerano, in it’s simplest form, is perfection. The courgettes melt into the butter and cheese and make this gorgeous silky, slightly bitter, slightly sweet sauce that’s totally unexpected and really moreish. You don’t need the creamy burrata, fresh basil and crunchy walnuts at the end, but I do…

Serves 4

400ml vegetable oil
4 courgettes, sliced thinly
200g Provolone (you can swap this for Parm, but try it with Prov if you can!)
400g spaghetti
50g salted butter
1 burrata
Handful fresh basil
50g walnuts, chopped

Heat all the oil in a wide pan. After a couple of minutes, test a round of courgette and if it sizzles, the oil is ready to semi-deep fry the rest of your courgette on both sides, in batches - don’t overcrowd the pan! - until golden. Set each fried batch to one side on kitchen roll, then once the excess oil has been absorbed, transfer to a plate to cool completely.

Bring a pan of heavily salted water to the boil and cook the spaghetti according to packet instrucions minus a couple of minutes.

While the pasta is cooking, heat the now-cooled courgette rounds in a new, large pan with a ladle of pasta water. Bring to a medium heat, then once the water is mostly gone, add the butter and stir while mashing the courgettes quite aggressively with a wooden spoon. You’re aiming for mushy courgettes inners with broken-up slithers of skin, and a resultantly silky sauce.

Once the spaghetti is cooked, reserve a cup or two of the water and drain. Chuck the spaghetti into the courgette pan along with almost all of the cheese (the last sprinkle is for serving).

Remove the pan from the heat and stir in a little pasta water at a time while stirring everything together so the sauce coats the spaghetti. There shouldn’t be too much in the way of sauce in the pan, more on the spaghetti, a bit like carbonara, so don’t feel like you have to use all the pasta water.

Serve with torn up burrata and basil, the chopped walnuts, the rest of the Provolone and lots of black pepper and olive or garlic oil.