Whole-Grain Reginetti with Rapini and Sausage

Original recipe by: Leslie Brenner

Stateside, pasta with rapini and sausage is much more common than the traditional Puglian combo of orecchiette, rapini and anchovies. I’m not a big fan of supermarket dried orecchiette, so my pasta of choice for this is the outstanding dried organic whole-grain reginetti from New York-based Sfloglini. But feel free to use any short pasta shape you like; farfalle or penne both work well.

The dish calls for bread crumbs toasted in oil with garlic, but even without that flourish, it’s excellent, so if you want to get this on the table in a jiff, omit them. (On the other hand, if you do make my garlic bread crumbs, you’ll have extra — enough for about three batches of the dish, and they’ll keep for a week or more stored in an airtight container.)

My treatment of the rapini was inspired by a recipe in New York chef Missy Robbins’ 2021 cookbook Pasta. Robbins has you separate the rapini leaves …