This simple yet incredibly luxurious dish from Phil Howard pairs freshly made strozzapreti ('priest-strangler') pasta with a luxurious sauce of butter, chicken stock and plenty of black truffle. If you don't have your own extruder at home, it's best to buy top quality dried pasta instead.
If you do not have a pasta extruder, you are better off buying a top-quality dried pasta than making freshly rolled pasta. This dish requires pasta that still has a firmness and ‘bite’ that you just cannot successfully get from hand-rolled pasta. If using dried pasta, cook it in boiling salted water until al dente, then skip to step 4
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If you are making the pasta from scratch, place the flour into a pasta extruder fitted with a strozzapreti die. Mix the egg yolks, olive oil and water together, add a pinch of salt, turn on the extruder and gradually add the egg mix. Knead until crumb like and then extrude, cutting into roughly 6cm lengths. Store the cut pasta on a tray covered with a cloth
Place a large pan of well-salted water on to boil. Drop the pasta into the water and cook at a rolling boil for 4 minutes. Check for doneness and cook further if it seems undercooked – the pasta should be firm
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Meanwhile bring the chicken stock to the boil, add the butter and, using a microplane, grate in the truffle. Boil this mixture briefly to create a wonderful buttery emulsion, but do not allow to reduce
Once cooked, drain the pasta and add to the sauce, cooking briefly until the pasta is glazed in the truffle emulsion. This will take a minute or two and is key to the success of the dish. The strozzapreti and sauce should become one epic entity of buttery, truffley, starchy pasta
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Tip into 4 warmed bowls and finish with freshly grated Parmesan
10g of
Parmesan, aged, finely grated (about 1 heaped tbsp)
Phil Howard has always been a ‘chef’s chef’, quietly notching up years of service and influencing the industry immeasurably. After selling his iconic two Michelin-starred restaurant The Square to open Elystan Street in Chelsea, he has proved himself yet again to be one of the UK's brightest culinary talents.
