Naples’ best kept secret: Spaghetti alla Vesuviana! 🔥 This easy pasta recipe is an explosion of flavors—named for the famous volcano whose eruption was responsible for the destruction of Pompei. In this video, Italy’s Flavia Diamante walks us through how to make the dish with the finest Italian ingredients.
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Watch Flavia Diamante prepare the incomparable Pasta Vesuviana recipe in this video, filmed in Italy!
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While Pasta alla Vesuviana seems to have much in common with another famous Neapolitan recipe— Pasta alla Puttanesca— this tasty pasta recipe has a taste all its own. A touch spicy and bursting with capers, olives, oregano and cheese (here, fresh mozzarella and Parmigiano Reggiano)—this pasta packs a punch. Want to know how to choose the best ingredients to make this dish sing? Keep reading!
Vesuviana Pasta: Choosing the Best Ingredients
The Tomatoes
The goal of most Italian tomato sauces is to bring out the sweetness of the tomatoes, which means starting with sweet, ripe and tasty tomatoes.
When we make this dish in Italy, we make our own tomato pulp from whole canned pomodori del piennolo— a variety of tomatoes which literally grow near the famous volcano that the dish is named after. However, it’s virtually impossible to find this variety of tomatoes at your average grocery outside of Italy.
Instead, we recommend choosing a sweet tomato purée or making your own purée by blending whole canned San Marzano tomatoes. See our article on best canned tomatoes for sauce for more on which Italian tomato brands we recommend.
The Capers and Olives
Rinse and Soak to Remove Salt and/or Vinegar
Feel free to use a mix of green and black olives for this recipe. Be sure to remove the pits of your olives if they do not come pitted. For both olives and capers: Give them a rinse to wash away any excess vinegar or salt. Then, let the olives and capers soak in filtered water for at least 30 minutes to further remove excess salt and vinegar.
Choose Nonpareil Capers When You Can
Capers come in different sizes and preserved in different ways. Gourmet capers are small and called nonpareil. They can be found preserved in salt or vinegar. We recommend the nonpareil capers if you can find them. While they are a bit harder to find outside of Italy, we also prefer salt cured capers over those sold in vinegar. This is simply because it is hard to remove all of the vinegar taste from the capers, and we don’t want that vinegar taste in all of our recipes.
Fry the Capers!
We prefer to fry the capers for this recipe. Frying capers in the olive oil not only gives the olive oil a really lovely infused flavor, but the capers themselves will have a better taste and texture. Since both Pasta alla Puttanesca and the Vesuviana Pasta recipe include capers, we think infusing the olive oil with capers helps to give this sauce an extra distinct flavor.
The Cheeses
The most traditional cheeses to add to Vesuviana Pasta are fior di latte mozzarella (fresh water-packed mozzaralla) and grated Parmigiano Reggiano cheese. Please do choose the real Parmigiano Reggiano cheese. In the US and elsewhere, ‘parmesan’ does not refer specifically to the Parmigiano Reggiano cheese popular in so many traditional Italian recipes.
Other Ingredients: Garlic, Onion, Chili Pepper and Oregano!
We recommend dried Sicilian oregano if you can find it! Sicilian oregano is very pungent unlike many supermarket brands. If you can’t find Sicilian oregano, look for greek oregano which also has a robust flavor.
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Vesuviana Pasta Recipe (Spaghetti alla Vesuviana)
Equipment
- 1 large skillet or saucepan to cook the sauce
- 1 Large Pot to cook the pasta
Ingredients
- 11 oz spaghetti
- 28 oz tomato purée or crushed whole canned tomatoes (traditional here are "pomodori del piennolo" from the region)
- 3 oz pitted green olives
- 3 oz pitted black olives
- 5 tbsp olive oil
- 2 tbsp capers preferably salt-cured nonpareil capers
- 3 cloves fresh garlic minced
- ½ large red onion minced
- 4 fresh red chili pepper minced; such as Calabrese
- 1 tbsp dry oregano Sicilian if you can find it
- 3 oz Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese finely grated
- 12 oz fresh mozzarella fior di latte ideally
Instructions
Soak the Olives and Capers
- Rinse and soak olives and capers for at least 30 minutes to remove excess salt or vinegar from preservation. Then, pat the capers dry.
Sauté the Aromatics (Make a Soffritto)
- Add a generous amount of olive oil to a skillet over medium heat and add the whole cloves of garlic (smashed). Sauté the garlic until it turns golden, then remove the cloves and discard them.5 tbsp olive oil, 3 cloves fresh garlic
- Add the capers to the garlic-infused oil and fry until they turn color. Remove the fried capers for use later.2 tbsp capers
- To the caper-infused oil, add the pepper and the onion. Cook the onion until it is tender and translucent.4 fresh red chili pepper, ½ large red onion
Add the Tomato Purée
- Add the tomato sauce to the hot oil and simmer. In the meantime…28 oz tomato purée
Partially Cook the Pasta
- Cook the pasta in salted, boiling water for ¾ of the cook time called for to make al dente pasta.11 oz spaghetti
Finish Cooking the Pasta in the Sauce
- Add the partially-cooked pasta to the sauce along with the olives and finish cooking the pasta to al dente in the sauce.3 oz pitted green olives, 3 oz pitted black olives
- Mix in the fried capers, oregano and cheeses to the finished pasta and serve!1 tbsp dry oregano, 3 oz Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese, 12 oz fresh mozzarella
