Pasta con l'anatra - pasta in duck sauce

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Using a whole duck to make pasta sauce is uncommon outside Italy.

Outside Italy pasta is considered a highly convenient dish. With dried ingredients you can store for month, you can cook up a meal in a matter of minutes. Tasty, healthy, with a different sauce every night.

The pasta recipes you find in Italian-language cookbooks are very different. Often they suggest you make your pasta from scratch, hardly a quick-fix lunch. Sometimes they recommend you cook a stew separately using prized ingredients such as rabbit or game to serve as a sauce. I always wanted to try one of these recipes. My choice settled on the Pasta con l'anatra - pasta in duck sauce.

First chop the ingredients coarsely:

Fry them with some guanciale over a hot flame and add the duck.

Add the herbs:

Add the tomato puree (passata):

Wet with the red wine and give it boil.

Leave the stew for about 90-120 minutes on the stove over a medium-low flame or as long as it takes for the duckling to be cooked through. Add water as required for the stew not to burn.

Fish out the cooked duck and lay it on a cutting board.

Cut out all the meat and cut in bite-size pieces.

Pour the sauce in a sieve and filter.

Return filtered sauce to the dish and decant it to remove the large quantity of duck fat.

Here is the result, al dente pasta in a gorgeous sauce with a rich and complex taste. Unlike any pasta you can eat outside Italy and well worth the effort!