Recipe
Penne all'Arrabbiata
Garlic and chili fried in olive oil, crushed tomatoes simmered 15 minutes, tossed with penne. Amounts from RecipeTin Eats.
Heat: Hot
- Prep
- 5 min
- Cook
- 20 min
- Makes
- 4 servings
Ingredients
Sauce
Pasta
To serve
Equipment
- Large pot for the sauce
- Large pot for the pasta
Steps
- Fry the garlic and chili. Heat the oil in the sauce pot over medium heat. Add the garlic and stir for 10 seconds, then add the fresh chili and the flakes. Cook for about 1 minute, until the garlic is light golden.
- Simmer the tomatoes. Add the tomatoes, salt and pepper. Bring to a simmer over high heat, then turn down to medium and simmer for 15 minutes. Taste at 10 minutes: add the sugar if it's sour, or more flakes if you want more heat.
- Cook the pasta. Meanwhile, boil the penne in water with the tablespoon of salt, as the packet says. Scoop out 1 cup of the cooking water before you drain it.
- Toss. Add the pasta to the sauce with ½ cup of the pasta water and toss over the heat until coated. Add more water if it's thick. Serve with parsley, and cheese if you like.
Notes
- Milder: seed the fresh chili, or leave it out and add flakes a little at a time while the sauce simmers (RecipeTin Eats).
- Roman style: use 14 oz (400 g) of whole peeled tomatoes crushed with a fork, simmer about 10 minutes, and serve it plain or with pecorino (Turismo Roma).
- Leftover sauce keeps 3 to 4 days in the fridge or 3 to 4 months in the freezer (USDA).
happyspicyhour.com
What arrabbiata means
Arrabbiata means “angry” in Italian. In Roman dialect, arrabbiato describes something pushed to excess, and in Rome any dish cooked with plenty of oil, garlic and chili, enough to make you thirsty, gets the name (Wikipedia, citing a Romanesco dictionary). GialloZafferano offers the popular version: the name seems to come from the red face of whoever eats it.
The sauce comes from Lazio and especially Rome. Its exact start is uncertain. Turismo Roma, the city’s tourism office, says it already appears in Ada Boni’s classic cookbook Il talismano della felicità and became a fixture of Roman trattorias after World War II. Wikipedia dates it to the 1950s and 1960s.
Romans serve it with penne rigate, which Turismo Roma calls the only pasta that does it justice on a Roman table.
How the recipes compare
None of the 10 uses onion. All fry the garlic and chili in olive oil before the tomatoes go in.
happyspicyhour.com
They agree on the method: garlic and chili go into the olive oil first, then the tomatoes. They split on two things:
- Fresh or dried chili. GialloZafferano, RecipeTin Eats and BBC Good Food use a fresh red chili; Dissapore, Barilla, Eataly and NPR use dried flakes. GialloZafferano says either works.
- Cheese. In Roman osterias the dish is often served al naturale, plain, with Pecorino Romano as an optional finish (GialloZafferano). Turismo Roma calls pecorino a newer addition, and Dissapore says the traditional version is served plain.
How hot is it?
The chili in Italy is peperoncino. A typical Calabrian peperoncino rates 15,000 to 30,000 Scoville heat units, and in Italian cooking its flavor matters more than its heat (Wikipedia). Supermarket red pepper flakes run about the same, 15,000 to 30,000 (PepperScale).
The recipes we compared use about ½ to 2 teaspoons of dried flakes per pound of pasta: ½ teaspoon at Eataly, about 1¾ at Dissapore and 2 at Barilla. Our recipe’s fresh chili plus ½ teaspoon of flakes is what RecipeTin Eats calls “medium to medium-hot”. For a milder sauce, seed the fresh chili or leave it out.
Arrabbiata vs fra diavolo, puttanesca and amatriciana
From Wikipedia and the 10 arrabbiata recipes compared below.
happyspicyhour.com
| Sauce | From | What makes it different |
|---|---|---|
| Arrabbiata | Rome | Tomato, garlic, chili, olive oil, parsley |
| Fra diavolo | Italian-American | Onion, herbs, often seafood |
| Puttanesca | Naples | Olives, capers and anchovies |
| Amatriciana | Amatrice, Lazio | Guanciale and pecorino |
Puttanesca and amatriciana are both spicy too, but arrabbiata is the only one with nothing besides tomato, garlic and chili (Wikipedia).
Storing leftover sauce
Cool it, then keep it in the fridge for 3 to 4 days, or freeze it for 3 to 4 months. Frozen sauce stays safe longer, but it loses flavor over time (USDA).
How we checked this
We compared 10 arrabbiata recipes: 5 from Italian sources (GialloZafferano, Turismo Roma, La Cucina Italiana, Dissapore and Giuliano Hazan’s version) and 5 in English (RecipeTin Eats, BBC Good Food, Barilla, Eataly and NPR). The name and history come from Wikipedia and Turismo Roma, the heat ratings from Wikipedia and PepperScale, and storage from USDA.
| We said | Now |
|---|---|
| 2 tsp of flakes is 80,000+ SHU | SHU rates the pepper, not the amount |
| Fra diavolo is almost always seafood | Pasta, seafood or chicken |
| Keeps 5 days in the fridge | 3 to 4 days |
More spicy pasta
If you cannot find the right chili for this sauce, our Calabrian chili substitutes guide has swaps, and our cayenne substitutes page helps when the cayenne runs out. For more ways to season a bowl of noodles, our guide to the best spices for pasta has pairings and amounts.
Sources
- RecipeTin Eats: Penne all'arrabbiata (2025)
- GialloZafferano: Penne all'arrabbiata
- Turismo Roma: Penne all'arrabbiata
- La Cucina Italiana: Penne all'arrabbiata (2015)
- Dissapore: Penne all'arrabbiata, ricetta originale (2025)
- BBC Good Food: Arrabbiata sauce
- Barilla: Penne all'arrabbiata
- Eataly: Pasta all'arrabbiata
- NPR: Penne all'arrabbiata (2010)
- Directo al Paladar: Pasta all'arrabbiata, after Giuliano Hazan
- Wikipedia: Arrabbiata sauce
- Wikipedia: Fra diavolo sauce
- Wikipedia: Puttanesca
- Wikipedia: Amatriciana
- Wikipedia: Peperoncino
- PepperScale: What is crushed red pepper?
- USDA FSIS: Leftovers and food safety