Copycat I Sodi Pici all’Aglione (Rita Sodi’s Tuscan Hand-Rolled Pasta, Made at Home)
Prep time: 45 min (plus 30 min rest) Cook time: 35 min Servings: 4
I Sodi has been one of the hardest tables to book in the West Village since Rita Sodi opened it in 2008. The original room on Christopher Street was tiny — about 35 seats — and in July 2023 the restaurant moved a few blocks to a larger space at 314 Bleecker Street. It still serves Florentine and Sienese food the way it was cooked in Tuscany before it was simplified for export, and reservations (via Resy) remain among the most coveted in the neighborhood. In 2019, Sodi and her partner and co-owner Jody Williams won the James Beard Award for Best Chef: New York City, recognized for their work at their other restaurant, Via Carota — one of the first times the award went to a pair.
I Sodi’s most famous plate is the pappardelle al cinghiale, a wild-boar ragù. But the pasta this recipe recreates — pici all’aglione — is the one home cooks most often want to learn, because it is achievable without hard-to-source game and it teaches two genuinely useful techniques. Two components, both ancient, both from Siena: pici, thick hand-rolled pasta made without egg, and all’aglione, which means dressed with aglione — a giant mild garlic from the Valdichiana valley, cooked slowly in olive oil until it loses all its sharpness and becomes something sweet and entirely different.
What Pici Is (and Why It Is Not Just Thick Spaghetti)
Pici is made from three ingredients: flour, water, and olive oil. No egg. The dough is stiff and workmanlike — closer to bread dough than to the supple egg-pasta doughs you roll on a machine. Every strand is shaped entirely by hand: a small piece of dough, rolled under flat palms on a wooden board, gradually thinned into a thick, irregular rope. Some sections come out thicker, some thinner. This is not a mistake; it is the point. The variation in thickness means that within a single serving, some strands are chewier and denser, others more tender, and they catch and hold sauce differently along their length.
The texture when cooked is genuinely unlike any extruded dried pasta. Pici is chewy in the way a very good loaf of bread is chewy — substantive and slightly resistant, with a toothsome pull before it gives. Because there is no egg to enrich the dough, the flavor is cleaner and more neutral than egg-pasta ribbons, which is by design: the pasta’s job is to carry the sauce without competing with it.
Pici recipes appear in Sienese texts from the Middle Ages. It is one of the oldest forms of pasta still made in Italy. At I Sodi, Sodi rolls it herself or has her cooks roll it to order, by hand, for every service.
What “All’Aglione” Actually Means
Aglione (ahl-YO-nay) means “big garlic” in Tuscan dialect. It refers to aglione della Valdichiana — a specific cultivar, grown in the clay soils of the Valdichiana valley, that produces bulbs significantly larger than standard garlic and cloves that are notably milder and sweeter. The difference is meaningful: where regular garlic is pungent, sharp, and briefly dominant, aglione is soft and slightly sweet even raw, and it loses almost all its sharpness when cooked.
The Sienese preparation is simple. Slice the garlic paper-thin. Cook it in a generous amount of olive oil over the lowest possible heat for 10 to 15 minutes, until it is completely golden and soft. Add peperoncino (crushed red pepper). Add crushed San Marzano tomatoes. Simmer 20 minutes. That’s the sauce.
Outside Italy, genuine aglione is nearly impossible to find — it is a small-production regional crop that does not travel in volume. For home cooks: use fresh garlic, large cloves from a young head, and cook it on the lowest heat your stove can produce for the full 12 to 15 minutes. The result will not be identical — standard garlic has more sharpness even when cooked — but it will capture the essential idea of the sauce: garlic as a vegetable, not just a seasoning.
The Garlic Cannot Burn
This is the one rule the sauce will not forgive. Garlic that browns darkly or burns in the oil carries that bitterness forward into the tomatoes and through the entire sauce. There is no rescuing it; you must start over.
The mechanism is chemistry. When garlic cooks slowly in warm oil, the harsh allicin compounds that cause sharpness break down and the natural sugars in the clove caramelize into softer, sweeter flavors. This takes time at low temperature — 12 minutes minimum. The same transformation happens faster at higher heat, but fast-cooked garlic also produces bitter compounds from the outside layer before the inside has had time to mellow. Low and slow is the only way to get sweet, golden garlic with no edge.
Set the pan on the lowest heat your stove can hold. The oil should barely shiver. A few tiny bubbles around the garlic, nothing more. Cook with patience and check every 3 minutes. When the garlic is faintly golden at the edges, completely soft, and smells sweet and slightly nutty — not sharp — it is ready.
How to Roll Pici
The rolling technique is simple but not immediately intuitive if you have only worked with sheeted pasta or extruded shapes. Here is exactly what to do.
Rest the dough at least 30 minutes before touching it. Gluten in unrested dough springs back immediately when stretched, and the strands tear rather than elongate. The rest is the difference between dough that rolls cooperatively and dough that fights you.
Work on a wooden board or a surface with some grip. Not smooth marble, not a slick laminate countertop. The friction between the dough and the board is what allows the rolling motion to extend the strand; on a smooth surface the dough slides and the strand won’t thin evenly. Do not flour the board — the dough needs to grip.
Pinch off a piece of dough about the size of a large marble. Lay both hands flat on top of it, with all fingers touching. Apply light downward pressure — not hard, just the weight of your hands — and roll the piece back and forth while simultaneously moving your hands outward from the center, as if you are unrolling something. The strand should thin and lengthen as your hands spread. Work from the center outward, not from one end to the other. If a section is too thick, place your hands over it and repeat the motion.
Target thickness is about ¼ inch — slightly thicker than a pencil. Target length is 8 to 10 inches. Sections that are thicker or thinner than others are correct and expected. The point of pici is that it is irregular. Set finished strands on a floured tray in a single layer and don’t let them touch until you are ready to cook.
The Finishing Step Matters
Pici all’aglione is not pasta with sauce poured on top. The pasta finishes in the sauce in a hot pan, with reserved pasta water added in splashes until the sauce coats each strand in a continuous glaze. This is the same principle as every good Italian pasta — mantecatura, the emulsification of pasta starch with the fat and liquid of the sauce.
Pici’s thick surface area absorbs sauce differently from thin pasta. Pull more pasta water than you think you’ll need (at least 1 cup) and add it aggressively during the 90-second pan toss. The sauce should glide when you tilt the pan, not sit as a pool at the bottom, and every strand should be visibly coated rather than bare with sauce only at the ends.
This pasta does not hold. It must be served immediately — within a minute or two of plating. The thick strands absorb the sauce as they cool and stiffen, and the dish that looked glossy and perfect in the pan will look dry and heavy by the time it reaches the table if you wait. Plate it and eat it.
On Cheese
Traditional pici all’aglione is served without cheese. The Sienese tradition is that the clean, direct flavors of garlic, olive oil, and tomato don’t need enrichment, and Pecorino or Parmigiano would muddy them. At I Sodi the dish is served as is, with the pasta and sauce as the whole picture.
If you add cheese, use a sharp aged Pecorino Romano rather than Parmigiano — it is saltier and more rustic, and its slightly animal funk complements the garlic-forward sauce better than Parmigiano’s milder nuttiness. Either way, add it off the heat, grated finely on a Microplane, after the pan comes off the burner. Cheese added to a hot active pan seizes and turns grainy.
