One Of Martha Stewart's Favorite Pasta Dishes Is Unusual — And Worth Making

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With the help of a gourmet regional ingredient, your pasta night is about to get an upgrade. Introducing: bottarga. If you've never tried it before, bottarga is a type of roe sack that has been salt-cured, pressed, and air-dried. It comes tuna or grey mullet fish and is one of the darlings of Martha Stewart's dinner rotation. In a video shared to the official Martha Stewart website, she describes discovering bottarga (aka "Mediterranean caviar") during her first visit to Sardinia. It was love at first bite. Stewart calls bucatini bottarga one of her "all-time favorites," raving, "I don't know if you've ever had a pasta you just can't stop eating, this is one of them."

Fellow celebrity foodie Amthony Bourdain also named Sardinian bottarga pasta as one of his most beloved dishes, but he preferred spaghetti over bucatini. Compared to spaghetti, bucatini is slightly thicker to surround a "buco" (aka hollow inner hole), creating a sauce-catching tube in every strand. Stewart par-cooks her bucatini in a pot of boiling water, then finishes cooking the pasta to al dente directly in a flavorful pan sauce made with lemon, butter, chicken stock, and Middle Eastern Aleppo pepper.

In her approach, Stewart tosses grated bottarga with garlic-toasted coarse breadcrumbs, salty capers, subtly sweet golden raisins, toasted pine nuts, shaved Parmesan, and chopped fresh parsley. Pro tip: Bottarga is fully salt-cured and ready to eat; use it to garnish finished pasta dishes, and don't cook it over heat.

Bottarga's lengthy and involved curing process makes it a distinctive product of Mediterranean culinary tradition. Tuna fish bottarga tends to be stronger and brinier than the roe sacks of the grey mullet. But, whatever the fish, bottarga is prized for its bold flavor and pungent aroma. The history of this gourmet delicacy is tied to the preservation methods of thrifty Italian fishermen looking to use every part of the catch. Salt-curing and aging makes bottarga intensely flavored, deeply savory, and shelf-stable.

In the recipe Martha Stewart shares on her website, the bottarga is grated over a microplane and stirred into the pasta with the sauce. Grating bottarga over finished dishes is a common way to serve the ingredient, not unlike truffles. But, bottarga can also be sliced into bite-sized pieces, and dotted like medallions on top of the pasta bed. That bucatini would create a generous chew alongside the toothy bottarga slices.

For foodies in the U.S., bottarga can be purchased from some specialty Italian grocery stores in major cities like New York, or (conveniently) from Amazon. Brands like Supreme Bottarga, a domestic importer of Sardinian roe sacks, make the regional specialty accessible globally. At $44.99 per 5.8-ounce package, it's pricey, but its shelf-stable nature may help justify the investment. As for Stewart (who swears by the costly-but-worth-it delicacy), she lauds bucatini bottarga as "A very delicious pasta — one that you'll remember forever."