Pasta
Orecchiette with Broccoli
The classic pasta of Puglia, made with broccoli: little ear-shaped orecchiette tossed with broccoli cooked soft enough to become a sauce, garlic, chilli and melted anchovies, and finished with crunchy lemon breadcrumbs. The original with turnip tops and other variations below.
- Serves 4
- Prep 10 min
- Cook about 20 min
- Italian (Puglia)
Variations: Orecchiette con cime di rapa, With sausage, Vegetarian, With pine nuts and raisins ↓
Method
Make the crumbs: heat 1 tablespoon of the oil in a large frying pan over a medium heat, add the breadcrumbs and a pinch of salt and stir for 3–4 minutes until golden and crisp. Stir in the lemon zest and tip onto a plate. Wipe out the pan.
Bring a large pan of water to the boil and salt it well. Prepare the broccoli: cut calabrese into small florets and peel and slice the stalks; for sprouting broccoli or Tenderstem, cut the stems into 3 cm (1¼ in) lengths and keep the tips and leaves.
Cook the broccoli in the boiling water until tender enough to crush with a spoon: about 5 minutes for calabrese, 3–4 minutes for sprouting broccoli. Lift it out with a slotted spoon or spider into a colander, keeping the water boiling.
Add the orecchiette to the same water and cook for 1–2 minutes less than the packet says (usually 10–12 minutes).
Meanwhile, put the remaining 4 tablespoons of oil in the frying pan with the garlic, chilli and anchovies and cook gently over a medium-low heat for 3–4 minutes, stirring, until the anchovies melt and the garlic is pale golden. Do not let the garlic burn.
Add the broccoli and a ladle of the pasta water to the pan and cook for 2 minutes, crushing about half the broccoli with the back of a spoon or a potato masher so it breaks down into a rough green sauce.
Lift the pasta straight into the frying pan with a slotted spoon or spider (or drain it, keeping a mugful of the water). Toss over a medium-high heat for 1–2 minutes, adding splashes of pasta water, until the pasta is just tender and coated in a glossy sauce. Season with pepper, a squeeze of lemon and salt if needed.
Serve in warm bowls, drizzled with a little extra oil and scattered with the crunchy lemon crumbs.
Tip: tap a step to tick it off as you cook.
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Variations
Four ways to change the main recipe. Each serves 4 and uses the same method unless it says otherwise.
Orecchiette con cime di rapa (the original)
Use 1 kg (2 lb 4 oz) cime di rapa (turnip tops, also sold as broccoli rabe or rapini), using only the tender leaves, buds and thin stems. Blanch them for 2–3 minutes before adding the pasta. They are pleasantly bitter; the anchovies, garlic and chilli balance them.
With sausage
Remove the skins from 3 good pork sausages (about 200 g / 7 oz), crumble the meat into the frying pan with 1 tablespoon oil and fry for 6–8 minutes until browned and cooked through, before adding the garlic and chilli. Leave out the anchovies if you like.
Vegetarian
Leave out the anchovies; add 1 tablespoon of rinsed capers with the garlic, and finish with grated pecorino or Parmesan as well as the crumbs (use a vegetarian hard cheese for a strictly vegetarian dish).
With pine nuts and raisins
A Sicilian touch: add 2 tablespoons toasted pine nuts and 2 tablespoons raisins (soaked in warm water for 10 minutes) with the broccoli.
Useful kit
- Spider strainer: lifts broccoli and pasta out of the pot so you can keep the water. Amazon UK · Amazon US
- Large deep frying pan or sauté pan: big enough to toss the pasta with the sauce. Amazon UK · Amazon US
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See also
Chef’s notes
- Cooking the broccoli and pasta in the same water is the Puglian way: the water picks up flavour from the broccoli and the starch from the pasta, and both help make the sauce silky.
- The toasted breadcrumbs (pangrattato) are the traditional topping in Puglia, where cheese was once too expensive for everyday meals. You can add grated pecorino or Parmesan if you like, but try it with crumbs first.
- Anchovies melt into the oil and give a savoury depth without tasting fishy. Leave them out for a vegetarian dish and add a few capers or more chilli instead.
- No orecchiette? Use another short pasta that catches the sauce, such as cavatelli, conchiglie or fusilli.
A little history: the "little ears" of Puglia
Orecchiette ("little ears") are the pasta of Puglia, the heel of Italy, traditionally made by hand from durum-wheat semolina and water, without eggs, which were too expensive for everyday pasta in the poor south.
Their best-known dish is orecchiette con le cime di rapa, with turnip tops. Serious Eats describes it as emblematic of Puglia’s cucina povera, the "poor cuisine" that made the most of cheap local ingredients and of the parts of the crop farmers could not sell. Toasted breadcrumbs stood in for cheese, which was also too dear.
Cime di rapa (broccoli rabe or rapini) are not a kind of broccoli: they are a form of the turnip, Brassica rapa. Because they are hard to find outside Italy, cooks such as Gennaro Contaldo, writing for Jamie Oliver, make the dish with ordinary broccoli, which is how most British cooks know it, and BBC Good Food uses purple sprouting broccoli.
Sources for these notes
For the history above and the advice in the notes.
- Serious Eats (Katie Leaird): Orecchiette con le Cime di Rapa (Apulian Orecchiette With Broccoli Rabe)
- Jamie Oliver (Gennaro Contaldo, from Cucina): Orecchiette con broccoli
- BBC Good Food (Cassie Best): Orecchiette with anchovies & purple sprouting broccoli
- Wikipedia: Rapini (broccoli rabe is a type of turnip, Brassica rapa)
How this recipe was developed
Orecchiette with broccoli (or turnip tops) is southern Italy’s classic broccoli dish and a favourite of British chefs. We combined the traditional method with two UK-friendly versions and wrote it for 4.
- One pot of water. Broccoli cooked first, then the pasta in the same water, and the broccoli crushed into a sauce: Gennaro Contaldo (Jamie Oliver).
- Crumbs instead of cheese. Seasoned breadcrumbs toasted in olive oil, and the cucina povera reasoning: Serious Eats; lemon zest in the crumbs: BBC Good Food (Cassie Best, 4.5 from 29 ratings).
- Base. Garlic, chilli and anchovies melted gently in olive oil: all three versions.
- Broccoli. Purple sprouting (BBC Good Food) or calabrese (Contaldo); cime di rapa as the original variation (Serious Eats).
- Quantities. 350 g pasta and 600 g broccoli for 4: Contaldo uses 300 g pasta and 650 g broccoli for 4; BBC Good Food 200 g pasta and 200 g broccoli for 2.
Sources we compared (ratings as shown on each site on 1 November 2026):
- Serious Eats (Katie Leaird): Orecchiette con le Cime di Rapa (4.6/5 from 5 ratings)
- Gennaro Contaldo (Jamie Oliver): Orecchiette con broccoli
- BBC Good Food (Cassie Best): Orecchiette with anchovies & purple sprouting broccoli (4.5/5 from 29 ratings)
This is an original Cookeryonline recipe written in our own words. Ingredient choices and techniques are credited above; no source text has been copied.