HOT DISH: Garganelli allo Zafferano at Bacio Trattoria

The Garganelli allo Zafferano. Amy Sowder photos

Bacio Trattoria owner Antonio Coppola.

By AMY SOWDER

What gives the Garganelli allo Zafferano pasta dish at Bacio Trattoria in Cross River its delicate, sweet, floral flavor with a slightly earthy-spice undertone? 

Why does the scent wafting up from your gleaming-white shallow bowl have a hint of hay, pepperiness, honey and leather?

The culinary culprit is the flower with lavender-colored buds that open to reveal a trio of vivid red stigmas: Crocus sativus, aka the saffron crocus. After all, allo zafferano means “with saffron.”

Saffron is the world’s most expensive spice. It’s easy to see why, when each saffron flower must be individually handpicked and the three stigmas carefully removed by hand. Plus, it reportedly takes more than 150 saffron flowers to produce one gram of spice — that’s about 4,000 saffron flowers to make a single ounce.

The golden rays of the highly-prized spice brighten this cream-colored dish into a sunshiny hue, but it’s not a one-hit wonder. 

Enter the savory seduction of shallots, the luxury of cream, the salty smoke of speck, and the tender, twirly ribs of garganelli pasta made fresh at Katonah Pasta. (The pasta shop is a partner with Bacio, Blue Dolphin and Le Fontane in Katonah and Dolphin South in Pleasantville.) You can tell this tender, fresh pasta isn’t that hard, dried boxed stuff. All the nooks and crannies of garganelli are a necessary nicety too. “The form of the pasta holds the sauce,” says owner Antonio Coppola as he watches pasta chef Renee Mejei stir in the pasta after boiling it for only a minute or two. “It’s hollow inside and incorporates the sauce better, and this sauce is rich.”

Mejei, executive chef Rey Calix and Jaime Ramirez have worked with Coppola at Bacio for 23 years.

That sauce is heavy cream deepened with a shower of Parmesan and speck, a type of lightly smoked, dry-cured prosciutto hailing from Alto Adige near Venice in northern Italy. But Coppola has no problem leaving out the speck for vegetarians. There’s so much going on in the dish, they’ll still be satisfied.

Sliced zucchini adds some color contrast and diversity of texture. The restaurant’s kitchen grows about a dozen zucchini plants, used in the summer for stuffed zucchini blossoms filled with ricotta, prosciutto and battered in tempura.

“The food here is amazing,” says regular customer Michael McCaffery, who lunches at Bacio weekly. “It’s quite consistent, and the bread is baked fresh.”

The bread is made daily in the basement with yeast, water, flour and olive oil, kneaded four or five times, with hours for resting and rising in between.

Upstairs, the restaurant’s indoor atmosphere has a clean, modern warmth to it, and there’s a covered patio that seats at least 20. The menu is inspired from all over Italy, including seafood, and in the fall, game meat like wild boar, venison, rabbit and quail. The daily specials change with the seasons, but the main menu changes only a bit. 

“Some dishes I can’t take off the menu. Our regulars won’t let me,” Coppola says.

In the pasta section, Garganelli allo zafferano is a mainstay, one of the most-ordered dishes. The dish first arrived at Bacio fresh off the boat about 15 years ago, when a chef who worked in a Milanese restaurant arrived in the U.S. to complete an internship for three months. 

“I said, ‘Before you leave, you’ve got to make a dish from your restaurant over there,’” Coppala says. “And it’s been a hit ever since.”

Bacio Trattoria is located at 12 North Salem Road, Cross River; baciotrattoria.com.