Olive Malfaldine

While I love all pasta shapes, I often find myself gravitating towards thick, fat noodles or pasta shapes with lots of texture. The most common in our pantry include bucatini, giant rigatoni, and a rotating assortment of curled edge pasta, from casarecce to fat fusilli. This array usually sits next to three or four jars of green and purple olives, stocked up in case of an emergency need for a fancy snack or impromptu aperitivo. In fact, it’s this shelf in my pantry that is one of my favorites: its contents often come in handy when there is nothing in our fridge. I can rest easy knowing that so long as there is pasta a few jars of something or another to go with it, we’ll eat good that night.

One pasta shape that isn’t so easy to find on supermarket shelves, however, is mafaldine. It’s a wide and long ribbon-like pasta with fancy curled edges. You’ll sometimes also see it called reginette, but I personally prefer the name mafaldine, which comes from the Italian Princess Mafalda of Savoy. She is one of the many Italian royal female figures to have a pasta or a dish named in her honor.

I’ll spare you the tragic story of Princess Mafalda and instead get right to this recipe: homemade olive mafaldine. Typically mafaldine are made from durum wheat semolina and water, and extruded through a bronze die, but here I’m breaking tradition and making them fresh, colored a blackish-purple with olive puree.

Coloring pasta is fun, but it usually doesn’t result in a whole lot of flavor within the pasta itself. But because olives have such a pronounced, briny flavor, you’ll notice that the olivey flavor shines through in this pasta. For this reason, you’ll want to salt your pasta water a little less than usual.

This pasta is great with a simple tomato sauce, topped with a few extra olives and fresh basil or oregano. Or you could marry together all the briny flavors and go for a mixed seafood sauce.