Red Wine Garlic Bucatini

*This post is sponsored by Barilla®

If there’s one food out there that epitomizes comfort for me, it’s pasta.

Memories of early Sunday night dinners at my grandparents’ house, walking into a kitchen with sauce bubbling away on the stove, meatballs being rolled on the counter and bottles of wine flowing among the adults, pasta etched it’s way into my heart early on.

These days, a house made pasta on a good restaurant’s menu is nearly impossible for me to pass up and while nothing really compares to the pappardelle my great aunt in Italy made by hand and served to us alongside some wild boar bolognese a few years back, I love almost every single shape, type and size it comes in.

My reaction to finding Barilla’s® bucatini on the grocery store shelf recently was probably a little out of line on the excitement scale but I simply couldn’t help myself.

Family dinners were pretty much always the staples: penne, rigatoni, linguine (never spaghetti, my family has a strange aversion to linguine’s rounder cousin for some bizarre reason) and maybe sometimes farfalle if someone got a little crazy that week.

So as an adult, I’ve come to love the more artisanal, less popular shapes, bucatini being one of them.

Like spaghetti, but with more chew to it (and a fun hole in the center!), bucatini holds up really well to thick sauces and the like. Although it’s just as delicious tossed in a simple white wine sauce too.

I immediately imagined it with a hearty bolognese (or something like this simple bucatini pasta with garlic shrimp) and a full glass of red wine but then my brain went on a tangent when it got to the wine part.

Would the bucatini turn red if I cooked it IN wine?

Google told me it would and this simplistic yet elegant red wine garlic bucatini was born.

The red wine gives the pasta a deep, almost sweet taste to each bite and adds an element of savory-ness to the meal that goes perfectly with the soft boiled egg served on top.

The yolk drips down onto each garlic bucatini strand as you twirl it around your fork and it’s pasta magic at its best.

As an affordable pantry staple, pasta can easily transform into a quick dinner alongside healthy fats, vegetables and protein.

If dying the pasta with wine sounds too complicated (it’s not) or just not how you want to use a bottle of red wine (I get that), definitely don’t give up on making a bucatini dish altogether. Try this bucatini cacio e pepe recipe instead with it’s simple five ingredient list. It’s classic Italian peasant food at its best.

Love this red wine garlic bucatini recipe?

Looking for more pasta recipes? Try one of these: Pasta Checca with Burrata, Creamy Tomato Ranch Pappardelle with Caramelized Onions and Split Pea Pesto Gemelli with Crispy Pancetta.

This is a sponsored conversation written by me on behalf of Barilla. The opinions and text are all mine.