Spaghetti alla chitarra con pallottine (Square Spaghetti with Tiny Meatballs)

If you’ve studied Italian cuisine at all, you’ve probably come across the notion that Spaghetti and Meatballs is an Italian-American invention and don’t exist in “real” Italian cookery.

Well, as it turns out, that’s only sort of true…

When it comes to Italian cooking, with its myriad regional and local dishes, you’ll almost always find exceptions that prove any rule. In this case, one notable exception comes from the the town of Teramo in the Abruzzo region: spaghetti alla chitarra con pallottine, or Square Spaghetti with Tiny Meatballs. It goes by a number of other names, including maccheroni alla teramana after its town of origin.

While both dishes share the same basic idea of pairing long pasta with tomato sauce and meatballs, the Abruzzese dish differs from its New World counterpart in a few important ways. First, it uses fresh pasta, specifically the square-shaped long pasta called spaghetti alla chitarra or sometimes just chitarrina for short, made with fresh egg pasta cut into strands with the eponymous pasta “guitar”. The sauce is often, but not always, a long simmering ragù made with beef, pork and—that most Abruzzese of meats—lamb.

Lastly and perhaps most importantly, the meatballs are incredibly tiny. I use the word advisedly. These meatballs should be about the size of a cooked chickpea! This last little detail is genius, if you ask me, as it turns an otherwise pretty awkward pairing into something more balanced and composed.

As you can probably tell, spaghetti alla chitarra con le pallottine is a fairly elaborate dish. In its original version, it’s definitely one for Sunday dinner or special occasions. But while it takes some time to prepare, it’s not particularly dificult. And you can make the pasta, ragù and meatballs all ahead of time, at your leisure, then finish the dish whenever you’re ready to eat.

You can also save time and effort by using store bought spaghetti alla chitarra and substituing a simple meatless tomato sauce for the ragù, in which case this practically becomes weeknight pasta.

Ingredients

Serves 4-6

For the ragù:

• 250g (1/2 lb) beef chuck, shank or neck (see Notes)
• 250g (1/2 lb) pork shoulder or neck (see Notes)
• 250g (1/2 lb) lamb shoulder, shank or neck (see Notes)
• 1 medium onion, finely chopped
• 1 medium carrot, finely chopped
• 2 bottles of tomato passata or 2 large cans of peeled tomatoes, passed through a food mill
• red pepper flakes, to taste (optional)
• salt
• olive oil

For the meatballs:

• 250g (1/2 lb) ground beef or veal, preferably ground twice
• 1 egg
• 2-3 heaping Tbs grated pecorino or parmigiano-reggiano cheese
• nutmeg
• salt and pepper
• oil for frying

For the spaghetti alla chitarra:

• 400g (4 cups) flour, preferably of the 00 type
• 4 eggs
• a pinch of salt

(Or use 500g (1 lb) store bought pasta)

To serve:

• Grated pecorino or parmigiano-reggiano cheese

Directions

Make the ragù

In a large pot, gently sauté the onion and carrot in olive oil until the onion turns soft and translucent.

Raise the heat and add the beef, pork and lamb to the pot. Brown them lightly on all sides, turning them from time to time and seasoning with salt and pepper. Take care not to burn the onion. Add the red pepper flakes if using.

Now add a splash of white wine and let it evaporate completely, again turning the meats so they are evenly coated with the wine and vegetables.

Add the tomato and enough water if needed to cover the meats. Lower the heat and let everything simmer gently for a good 2-3 hours, or until the meat is tender and the sauce well reduced.

Remove the meats from the pot and set aside for use as a secondo (second course) or for another meal.

Make the meatballs

Mix the meatball ingredients well in the bowl, until you have a uniform paste.

Form the ground meat mixture into tiny balls about 1 cm (0.39 inch) in diameter, or as small as you can manage.

In a wide skillet, add enough oil to cover the bottom by about 1 cm. Get the oil nice and hot, then add the meatballs. Fry them until they are just lightly brown, perhaps 2-3 minutes, moving the skillet in a constant circular motion so the meatballs roll around and cook evenly all over. Don’t crowd the pan; proceed in batches if need be.

As they cook, transfer the meatballs to a saucepan, then cover them with some of the sauce.

Make the pasta

Following the directions found in this post, make spaghetti alla chitarra with the egg, flour and salt.

Lay the spaghetti on a lightly floured flat surface until you’re ready to proceed.

Finish the dish

Bring the sauce and the meatballs to a gentle simmer. Keep them warm while you cook the pasta.

Bring a large pot of well salted water to a boil. Add the pasta and cook until al dente.

Drain the pasta well, then transfer it to a large serving bowl. Ladle the sauce over it— or as much sauce as you need to dress the pasta nicely without drowning it—and mix well.

Top the dress pasta with the meatballs and their sauce.

Serve immediatley, with grated cheese and the rest of the sauce on the side.

Notes on spaghetti alla chitarra con le polpettine

As mentioned at the top, this dish is composed of three main elements, each of which requires its own preparation and care.

The tiny meatballs

The trickiest part of the recipe is turning out those tiny 1 cm meatballs. In Italy there’s actually a gadget for this job called a Poldino polpettino. It’s a kind of giant potato ricer with 1 cm holes you press into a thin layer of ground meat to form tiny meatballs. You can see my cyber friend Tina of Tina’s Table using it in this video.

How I wish I had one! Unfortunately they are not sold in the US or as far as I know, elsewhere outside the EU. You can apparently order one from Italy via amazon.com or eBay, if you’re willing to pay the shipping and (these days) tariff, which brings the price to a gobsmacking $103. Personally, I think I’ll wait and pick one up on my next trip to Italy…

Instead you can use a mini 1 tsp-cookie scoop or just a teaspoon to the job. You roll each scoop between the palms of your hands to form a perfect ball. You’ll need to rinse your scoop or spoon in cold water from time to time to prevent sticking. You’ll wind up with meatballs not as tiny as they should be, more like a small olive than a chickpea. But, as my high school music teacher used to say when we were tuning our instruments, “it’s good enough for jazz”.

Another thing that helps is using finely or twice ground meat. If you use coarsely ground beef for meatballs this small, they may well turn out lumpy. Ask your butcher to grind the meat twice or, if you have a meat grinder, grind it yourself when you get home. Or just give the meatball mixture a few turns in a food processor, using the pulse function.

The ragù

For the meats, you want the same cuts you would use for a stew—shoulder/chuck or shank work well. You want a large single pieces of meat, not ground or cubed. Given the high cost of meat these days, especially beef, you could use the neck. If you go this route, do look for neck that has a goodly amount of meat on the bone. These won’t give you enough meat for another proper course or meal, but it costs only a fraction of what other cuts do.

To save on time, you can make your ragù in a pressure cooker. Proceed as per the recipe above up to the point where you add the tomato. Then cook under pressure on high for an hour and use a natural release. Once the pressure has released, if the sauce looks a bit thin, simmer it for, say, 15 minutes or so to reduce it to your desired consistency and concentrate the flavor.

The pasta

Spaghetti alla chitarra, also known as maccheroni alla chitarra or chitarrina for short, is actually one of the easier fresh pastas to make, as you will see in our post on making them. That said, you will need a special purpose ‘guitar’ to cut your pasta sheet. In a pinch you could use the spaghetti attachment on your pasta machine.

If you want to use store bought pasta, De Cecco, La Molisana and Garofalo brands all produce spaghetti alla chitarra. (La Molisana calls it spaghetto quadrato chitarra or square chitarra spaghetti.) Some stores near me also sell fresh spaghetti alla chitarra so you might want to ask around. There is also a chitarra that comes from Campofilone in Le Marche, which is quite fine. It’s wonderful, but perhaps too fine for this dish.

If you’re using your own homemade fresh pasta, it should take about 3-6 minutes or so to cook, depending of thickness, dryness and, of course, your personal preference. If using store bought, follow the directions on the package.

Dressing the pasta

One of these days I plan to do a post on cooking and dressing pasta, but this is a good occasion to go over a couple of do’s and don’ts. Most of all, I want to point out two very common mistakes that non-Italians make when dressing pasta with a sauce:

• Mix the pasta with the sauce. All too often, pasta is served with the sauce just ladled on top. You should mix the pasta with the sauce before serving so the pasta is evenly coated. While in theory each guest could do the mixing for themselves, in practice the undressed pasta tends to turn cold and stick together while it’s waiting around to be mixed.
• Use just enough sauce. Not too much, not too little. You should use just enough sauce to coat the pasta nicely. Of course, you want a tasty pasta, so don’t use too little sauce. And you can use a bit more for topping the pasta. There a role for personal taste here, of course, but all too often cooks overdo it and practically smother the pasta with sauce. I guess the thinking is that more is better, but too much sauce produces an overly heavy, unbalanced dish. And after all, you are serving pasta with a sauce, not sauce with some pasta! You can serve any extra sauce on the side for those who want more.

The verb I like to use for this is dressing the pasta. Just like you would dress a salad. Just as you want to mix a dressing with your salad greens before serving and don’t want to overload the salad with too much dressing, so with pasta, too. I think it’s a good way to think about the process.

Variations

Not all recipes for spaghetti alla chitarra con pallottine call for the long cooking ragù. In many recipes, especially more contemporary ones, you make a simple, meatless tomato sauce then simmer the tiny meatballs in the sauce for a few minutes to lend it some of their meaty flavor. This, of course, cuts down on time.

If you don’t care for lamb, you can omit it from the ragù, though lamb is so characteristic of Abuzzese cookery to my mind it’d be a shame.

In some recipes, you make the meatballs with a mix of beef and pork. A few (not many) also add bread filler as you would normally to tenderize larger meatballs, but these meatballs are so tiny they don’t need it. Ditto for minced garlic and parsley, which are standard for meatballs but not for these.

Recently it’s become quite de rigueur to skip the frying and just poach the meatballs directly in the sauce. This saves some time and produces (perhaps) a lighter dish. But I’m old school here. I find that extra step adds a lovely depth of flavor.

Not really a variation but actually a different dish, in Puglia they dress orecchiette with a tomato sauce and tiny meatballs. The pairing is even better as the concave shape of the pasta is the perfect way to catch those tiny meatballs. But that’s the subject for a future post.

Making ahead

As mentioned, you can make the ragù, meatballs and even the pasta ahead at your leisure, then finish the dish whenever you’re ready to eat. In fact, like most long simmering sauces, the ragù is best made the day before as an overnight rest will improve its flavor. If you make the meatballs ahead, do be sure to cover them in sauce so they don’t dry out. Both can be kept in the fridge for a few days without a problem. And you can freeze them if you wantto keep them longer than that.

Fresh pasta is a little trickier. It’s best to make fresh pasta the same day you want to serve it. You can just leave your spaghetti alla chitarra out on a lightly floured surface until you want to boil them. If you making them ahead more than an hour or two, you might want to cover them with a kitchen towel. so they don’t dry out too much. Bear in mind that the further ahead you make them, the longer they will take to cook.

If you’re not making the pasta the same day, its best to freeze it. Toss the pasta with some four, then gathering a few strangs at a time, lay it out in little ‘nests’ on a cookie sheet. Place it in the freezer and leave it about an hour. Then take it out, bag your pasta then put it back in the fridge for storing.

Post scriptum

In my 10 years living in Italy, I never came across anything resembling Italian-American Spaghetti and Meatballs. And during my own childhood, I don’t remember Angelina ever serving it, even if she made meatballs often, often but not always in her Sunday sauce. But she served it separately, on the same plate with the pasta.

But after I posted this recipe, an Italian cyberbuddy commented that he remembered eating spaghetti and meatballs—big meatballs, not polpettine— as a kid in Sicily. So there’s another exception!

And I got a comment from an Italian on social media that he knows about ‘several’ exceptions. Didn’t mention which, however. Just goes to show that you should avoid making sweeping statements about Italian cooking.

Print Recipe

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Spaghetti alla chitarra con pallottine (Square Spaghetti with Tiny Meatballs)

Total Time3 hours hrs

Course: Primo

Cuisine: Abruzzo

Keyword: boiled, fried, pasta, simmered

Servings: 6

Calories: 587kcal

Ingredients

For the ragù:

• 250 g beef chuck, shank or neck (see Notes)
• 250 g pork shoulder or neck (see Notes)
• 250 g lamb shoulder, shank or neck (see Notes)
• 1 medium onion finely chopped
• 1 medium carrot finely chopped
• 2 bottles tomato passata or 2 large cans of peeled tomatoes, passed through a food mill
• red pepper flakes to taste (optional)
• salt
• olive oil

For the meatballs:

• 250 g ground beef or veal, preferably ground twice
• 1 egg
• 2-3 Tbs grated pecorino or parmigiano-reggiano cheese
• nutmeg
• salt and pepper
• oil for frying

For the spaghetti alla chitarra:

• 400 g flour preferably of the 00 type
• 4 eggs
• a pinch of salt
• Or use 500g (1 lb store bought pasta)

To serve:

• Grated pecorino or parmigiano-reggiano cheese

Metric – US

Instructions

Make the ragù

• In a large pot, gently sauté the onion and carrot in olive oil until the onion turns soft and translucent.
• Raise the heat and add the beef, pork and lamb to the pot. Brown them lightly on all sides, turning them from time to time and seasoning with salt and pepper. Take care not to burn the onion. Add the red pepper flakes if using.
• Now add a splash of white wine and let it evaporate completely, again turning the meats so they are evenly coated with the wine and vegetables.
• Add the tomato and enough water if needed to cover the meats. Lower the heat and let everything simmer gently for a good 2-3 hours, or until the meat is tender and the sauce well reduced.
• Remove the meats from the pot and set aside for use as a secondo (second course) or for another meal.

Make the meatballs

• Mix the meatball ingredients well in the bowl, until you have a uniform paste.
• Form the ground meat mixture into tiny balls about 1 cm (0.39 inch) in diameter, or as small as you can manage.
• In a wide skillet, add enough oil to cover the bottom by about 1 cm. Get the oil nice and hot, then add the meatballs. Fry them until they are just lightly brown, moving the skillet in a constant circular motion so the meatballs roll around and cook evenly all over. Don’t crowd the pan; proceed in batches if need be.
• As they cook, transfer the meatballs to a saucepan, then cover them with some of the sauce.

Make the pasta

• Following the directions found in this post, make spaghetti alla chitarra with the egg, flour and salt.
• Lay the spaghetti on a lightly floured flat surface until you’re ready to proceed.

Finish the dish

• Bring the sauce and the meatballs to a gentle simmer. Keep them warm while you cook the pasta.
• Bring a large pot of well salted water to a boil. Add the pasta and cook until al dente.
• Drain the pasta well, then transfer it to a large serving bowl. Ladle the sauce over it— or as much sauce as you need to dress the pasta nicely without drowning it—and mix well.
• Top the dress pasta with the meatballs and their sauce.
• Serve immediatley, with grated cheese and the rest of the sauce on the side.

Nutrition

Calories: 587kcal | Carbohydrates: 53.9g | Protein: 37.7g | Fat: 23.3g | Saturated Fat: 8.3g | Polyunsaturated Fat: 2.2g | Monounsaturated Fat: 10.7g | Cholesterol: 230.3mg | Sodium: 1343.4mg | Potassium: 597.3mg | Fiber: 2.4g | Sugar: 1.6g | Vitamin A: 1912.5IU | Vitamin C: 2.2mg | Calcium: 78.2mg | Iron: 6.3mg

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