I make pasta on the regular, and what better way to elevate the dish by adding in delicious pieces of capocollo?! Mastro's Capocollo, sometimes called coppo, comes from the Calabria region of Italy. It is a combo between the pork's head and neck, and is free of trans fatty acids. Mastro uses only the finest cuts of meat and seasons it with the finest of ingredients. In store, I found the extra lean cooked capocollo in regular and hot flavoured, which is perfect because you can add both into your pasta without making it super spicy.
The first step is to make the pasta. Just make it like how you'd normally make pasta (boil and rinse under cold water once done).
While the pasta is cooking, I prepared the capocollo. I opened up both packages and cut it up into slices. Not going to lie, I ate a couple pieces while cutting. Haha, what?! Don't judge. It's the perfect way to snack while cooking! I know you think the same.
Once you've sliced the capocollo into little slivers, heat up your favourite pan (mine is this white one from Ballarini) with a couple drops of oil. You don't need too much as you don't want to oil up the slices of lean meat.
Once hot and ready to go, dump all the sliced capocollo onto the pan and listen to that hot sizzzzzzle. Depending on how crispy you want your capocollo to be, I would taste test accordingly (haha, any excuse to eat). I left mine on for about 4 minutes.
While that's happening, heat up the sauce in the same pot that you used to boil your pasta. Here I'm using my favourite sauce, vodka sauce (not only because 'vodka' is in it - I actually really like it haha). Once the sauce is ready, pour your strainer full of penne back into the pot and stir it up. Once the pasta is coated with your sauce, put in your crispy capocollo and mix it in.
Put your delicious penne into bowls and it is ready to serve! Feel free to add any vegetables to it. I really like adding mushrooms and spinach to it, but here I topped it with some lettuce as garnish. If you like your pasta spicy, you could also add some chili flakes to it to spice it up!
And there you have it! A super easy pasta recipe using the delicious capocollo will definitely satisfy anyone with a pasta craving - I promise.
To make it even better for you, if you click HERE, you can get a $1 off coupon on any pre-packaged proscuitto cotto, capocollo or mortadella!! Happy cooking and eating :)
