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Recipe

A Bite To Eat With Alice: Box-grater broccoli pasta

Prep time: 
10
Cook time: 
40
Skill level: 
Low
Serves: 
4
Box grater broccoli pasta finished dish in serving bowl on bench top.

This tasty pasta dish is easy to prepare. (ABC News: David Sier)

Alice Zaslavsky is the host of A Bite To Eat with Alice, weeknights at 6pm on ABC TV and anytime on ABC iview. Alice is the resident culinary correspondent for ABC News Breakfast and ABC Radio, a food literacy advocate, bestselling cookbook author, and creator of Phenomenom, a free digital toolbox helping teachers slip more serves of veg into the curriculum.

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Comedian and satirist Mark Humphries joined Alice in the kitchen.

Alice made him this dish in the hopes that it'd be an easy way for him to pack more veggies in for his pasta-loving kids. 

Plus, it's a great dish to cook on the road!

chopped and dices ingredients on top of chopping board for box grater broccoli pasta

This dish is full of herby and zesty flavours. (ABC News: David Sier)

This recipe appears in A Bite to Eat with Alice, a new nightly cooking show on ABC iview and weeknights at 6pm on ABC TV.

Find the full list of recipe credits here.

A Bite To Eat With Alice: Box-grater broccoli pasta

Prep time: 
10
Cook time: 
40
Skill level: 
Low
Serves: 
4

Ingredients

For the broccoli pangrattato:

Method

  1. Using the large holes on the box grater, coarsely grate the French shallots and set aside. Then, using the smaller holes on the wide side of the grater, finely grate the garlic and set aside.
  2. Using the large holes on the box grater, grate the broccoli 'fur' (the dark-green fuzzy outer layer of the florets — leave the tight, inner florets intact) and set aside.
  3. Trim and peel the stalks of the broccoli. Using the large holes of the box grater, grate the remaining broccoli, including the florets and stems, and set aside.
  4. Thread parsley stalks through the large holes of the box grater with the leaves facing out, then pull through from the inside — the leaves should snip off the stalks. Finely chop the stalks and roughly chop the leaves, reserving some leaves for garnish, and set aside.
  5. Bring a large pot of salted water to the boil.
  6. Meanwhile, to make the pangrattato, rinse and dry the grater. Grate the bread to make breadcrumbs and set aside with the broccoli fur. On the finest side of the box grater, zest the lemon and set the zest aside. Slice the naked lemon into wedges and set aside. Heat a large frying pan over medium-high heat. Add the butter. When foaming, add the breadcrumbs, broccoli fur and half the garlic and cook and toss for 10 minutes until golden. Remove from the heat, add the lemon zest and chopped parsley leaves, stir to combine then remove to a bowl and set aside.
  7. Place the pan back over medium heat and add the olive oil, shallots, parsley stems and remaining garlic and sauté for 5 minutes. Toss in the capers, currants and grated broccoli florets and stems and sauté for another 5 minutes until jammy. Add a splash of water from the pasta pot and sauté for another minute. Turn off the heat.
  8. Meanwhile, add the pasta to the pot of boiling water. Stir, return the water to a boil and cook for a minute less than the packet directions require. Scoop out two mugfuls of pasta water and set aside. Drain the pasta.
  9. Return the broccoli sauce to a gentle simmer over medium heat. Add half the reserved pasta water (the starchy liquid helps emulsify and season the sauce). Gradually add more pasta water if desired and simmer until it has reached your preferred texture. (I like my sauce runnier because the pasta sucks up the juices while it continues cooking in the residual heat of the sauce, which is why we don't cook the pasta for as long as the packet tells us to.) Stir through the cooked pasta, most of the parmesan and half the pangrattato. Squeeze over the lemon wedges (reserve a few wedges to serve), stir and taste for seasoning.
  10. Place pasta on a serving platter and sprinkle the remaining broccoli pangrattato over the top. Serve with extra parmesan, extra lemon wedges, parsley leaves and a final flourish of olive oil.
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