Pappardelle

Food & Wine’s Justin Chapple makes a bright and nutty mint-and-pistachio pesto as the sauce for this fresh and summery warm pasta dish.

Andrew Carmellini serves fresh pappardelle with a ragù of house-ground lamb shoulder cooked in lamb stock. He finishes the dish with fresh ricotta and chopped mint. Home cooks can use store-bought pappardelle, ground lamb and chicken stock, then top the dish with fresh ricotta and mint.

Lidia Bastianich stuffs homemade ravioli with ricotta, leeks, scallions and spinach, then serves it in a butter-sage sauce. Deconstruct the ravioli by mixing pappardelle with all the ingredients in the filling (except the labor-intensive leeks).

At Incanto, chef Chris Cosentino braises beef shank and oxtail in red wine to make a brasato he serves with house-made mint pappardelle. Instead of oxtail, the simplified dish uses just beef shank. Fresh pappardelle from a store replaces the house-made kind.

In his gorgeous In.gredienti cookbook, Massimiliano Alajmo includes a dish called "pasta butter and smoke," made with smoked pasta and smoked butter and served with smoked hen broth. In this much-simplified version, the smoky flavor is all in the butter; it's mixed with cheese and chopped fresh herbs to make a rich sauce for silky pappardelle.

Chefs love showcasing the intensely earthy flavor of buckwheat in rich, luxurious dishes. At Craft Los Angeles, Matthew Accarrino tosses buckwheat pasta with creamy mascarpone, silky mushrooms and runny eggs.

Paul Grieco of Terroir in Manhattan is one of the few sommeliers to serve wines from Sicily's Frank Cornelissen, who favors a hyper-natural approach and the use of amphorae for red wines. Chef Marco Canora's pasta with braised duck is just the thing with Cornelissen's red; this version calls for duck confit.

Tom Colicchio learned to cook using Jacques Pépin's La Technique and 1979 La Methode. The books' lessons came in handy during an apprenticeship at the Hôtel de France in Gascony, in southwest France. One morning, Colicchio showed up for work after a long night of drinking. "The chef took one look at me, said 'I have a job for you' and pointed at a box with a big, dead hare in it. Luckily, Jacques had written about prepping rabbit, so I knew what to do." Colicchio (an F&W Best New Chef 1991) perfected the dish below when he was working at Manhattan's Gramercy Tavern, braising the tender rabbit with sweet tomatoes, spicy soppressata and olives.

This is a signature dish at Komi, where Johnny Monis slowly roasts the baby goat in milk until it's meltingly tender, then simmers it in tomato sauce before spooning it over fresh, eggy pappardelle noodles. The key to the dish is giving all of the elements enough time to come together: "We never serve our ragù the same day we make it," Monis says. "When the ragù is allowed to cool overnight, the flavor and texture completely change."

For the luscious meat sauce here, Gerard Craft braises pork with apples and honey, which adds some unexpected sweetness. Another surprise: He finishes the pasta with a sprinkling of smoked salt.

Pappardelle with porcini mushrooms is Shea Gallante's favorite pasta: "It's great in its simplicity," he says. What makes this version extraordinary are the roasted pistachios, which add a sweet nuttiness.

This goes well with a cherry-rich, medium-bodied Chianti Classico.