Martina's Sardinian Lamb Ragù with Fresh Paccheri Pasta

On the beautiful island of Sardinia, locals often regale visitors with the quip - in the vernacular - ‘’ci funti prusu brebeis de genti’’, or “there are more sheep than people here”. Indeed, Sardinia’s 3 million sheep dwarf its human population of 1.6 million. This is unsurprising, for Sardinia is renowned throughout the gastronomic word for the production of its Pecorino Sardo, a cheese made from the milk of its special Sarda sheep.

But Sardinians, a resourceful people, also herd sheep throughout the island’s mountainous interior, making Sardinia a centre for slow-cooked lamb ragù dishes. This is particularly the case in springtime, when the quality of lamb is known to be exceptionally high and the meat is at its most tender. The addition of fennel to lamb dishes is also common in some parts of Sardinia, where this herb - “finocchio” in Italian - grows freely through the island’s countryside. This week, though, we’ve left it out as one of our chefs, Martina, hails from the island and, in her family’s recipe, fennel is omitted (though plenty of other aromatics, including freshly-cut rosemary and thyme, provide beautiful fragrance).

Our ragù, inspired by Sardinia, is prepared using a prime cut of spring lamb shoulder, which, after hours of slow-cooking, falls apart. We serve with fresh paccheri pasta, whose rustic, cavernous interiors seem to evoke the mountainous landscape of Sardinia. Of course, as Martina hastens to point out, this pasta shape hails from the Italian mainland. Martina’s nonna, and her nonna before her, served this pasta with ciccioneddus, a variant on malloreddus, Sardinia’s most famous pasta shape.