Pasta con le Sarde: Sicilian Bucatini with Sardines and Fennel

Why this recipe works for weight loss

499 calories for a full plate of pasta, and the pasta is only 211 of them. Two ounces of dry bucatini per person is the USDA reference serving and roughly two thirds of what you would be given in a restaurant; what fills the plate back up is 350 g of fennel and 190 g of sardines across four servings. That is the structural trick of every pasta dish in our weight-loss collection — keep the pasta at a measured weight and build volume out of something that is not pasta. Our guide to eating Italian and losing weight goes through the arithmetic in more detail.

23 g of protein a serving, which is unusual for a pasta. The 92 g in the pan comes mostly from the fish: 47 g from the sardines, 30 g from the durum, and the balance from the fennel, onion, pine nuts and breadcrumbs. For comparison, our Sicilian tuna pasta gets to 31 g but at 662 calories, because it uses a full 100 g of pasta per person. A plain tomato pasta would be around 13 g.

Oily fish twice a week is one of the few dietary recommendations that has held up. The Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2020–2025 ask for at least 8 oz of seafood a week, and the American Heart Association's science advisory (Rimm et al., 2018, Circulation) recommends one to two servings of seafood per week specifically for the long-chain omega-3s in oily fish — sardines, anchovies, mackerel, salmon. Two tins of sardines split four ways is one of those servings, at a cost of about two dollars. Mozaffarian and Wu (2011, Journal of the American College of Cardiology) is the review to read on what the omega-3s are actually doing and where the evidence is thinner than the headlines.

6.3 g of fiber, nearly half of it from the fennel. A large bulb and its fronds bring 10.9 g of fiber to the pan, the pasta 7.3 g and the whole-wheat breadcrumbs 2.1 g. Reynolds and colleagues (2019, The Lancet) found the clearest health benefit in adults eating 25–29 g of fiber a day, against a US average closer to half that.

The honest caveat is sodium: 705 mg a serving. The largest single line is the tablespoon of salt in the pasta water, counted here in full at 388 mg a serving even though most of it is poured away — a limitation of how the nutrition table is built, and the same one applies to every pasta recipe on this site. What is genuinely on the plate is the sardines at about 146 mg, the two anchovy fillets at 73 mg, the breadcrumbs at 45 mg and the fennel's own 45 mg. If sodium is the number you track, salt the water with a teaspoon instead of a tablespoon and let the anchovy do the seasoning.

Tips from our kitchen

• The fennel water is the recipe. If you take one thing from this page, it is that the pasta cooks in the water the fennel boiled in. Boiling the fennel separately and then cooking the pasta in fresh water gives you a dish that tastes like its parts rather than like one thing, and it is the mistake that makes people conclude that cultivated fennel 'doesn't work'.
• Buy sardines with the bones in. Skinless-boneless tins exist and they are the wrong product here: the bones are soft enough to crush against the roof of your mouth, they are where most of the calcium is, and taking them out also takes out the texture. If the idea bothers you, the pieces break up enough in the pan that you will not meet one.
• Toast the breadcrumbs in a pan you can see into. They go from done to burnt faster than any other step, and in a dark pan you cannot tell. A stainless pan shows you the color change against the metal. Make double and keep the extra in a jar — they are good on any pasta with fish, on roasted vegetables, and on the Sicilian caponata.
• Fennel fronds are not optional and they are not a garnish. They carry most of the anise flavor the bulb lacks; the bulb is mostly texture and sweetness. If the fennel at your store has been trimmed down to a bare bulb, buy a second one for the tops, or add another ¼ tsp of crushed fennel seed and accept that the dish is a little flatter.
• Warm, not hot. In Palermo this is eaten at room temperature as often as not, and there is a reason — the saffron and the fennel read more clearly when the plate is not steaming. Leftovers eaten cold from the fridge are genuinely good, which is not true of most pasta.

Variations

• Pasta con le sarde a mare — literally 'with the sardines still at sea', the version poor households made when there was no fish. Leave out the sardines entirely, double the anchovy to 4 fillets and double the breadcrumbs to 60 g. That gives 432 calories, 13 g of protein and 6.8 g of fiber a serving: the protein falls from 23 g to 13 g, which tells you exactly how much work the sardines were doing.
• With fresh sardines, if you have a fish counter that butterflies them: 1 lb (450 g) of fresh sardine fillets, half of them added with the fennel so they dissolve into the sauce and half laid on top in the last 3 minutes. Fresh is better and it is also a different dish — cleaner, less savory, and it needs eating the same day.
• Baked, as pasta 'ncasciata: toss everything together 2 minutes underdone, tip it into a ceramic dish, cover with the toasted breadcrumbs and bake at 400°F (200°C) for 15 minutes until the top is crisp. The calories do not change; what changes is that you can make it in the afternoon and bake it when people arrive.
• The white Catanese version: leave out the tomato paste. It takes the serving to 496 calories, and the dish goes paler and more floral, with the saffron and fennel further forward. Worth trying once you have made the red one, so you can tell what the tablespoon of paste was contributing.
• More pasta, for anyone not counting: at 3.5 oz (100 g) of dry bucatini a head instead of 2 oz, a serving is 660 calories with 29 g of protein. That is the restaurant portion, and it is the right one if you are feeding someone who has been outdoors all day.

Storage & meal prep

Keeps 3 days covered in the fridge and is one of the few pasta dishes that is actually pleasant cold — in Sicily it is normal to eat the leftovers straight from the refrigerator the next day, and the saffron and fennel come through more clearly than they do hot. To reheat, use a skillet over medium-low with 2 tablespoons of water per serving and keep it moving for 3 to 4 minutes; a microwave dries out the bucatini and makes the sardines smell much stronger than they taste. Store the toasted breadcrumbs separately in a jar at room temperature — they keep 2 weeks and go instantly soft in the fridge. Do not freeze it: the sardines turn grainy and the fennel collapses to threads.