This is how to make the famous tajarin, an egg yolk pasta dough from northern Italy. It’s a rich, vibrant dough versatile in the kitchen that works with a variety of different sauces.

Pronounced tie-yah-REEN, tajarin is dialect for tagliolini in “regular” Italian, and it’s a handmade, spaghetti-ish shape that is often made with an exorbitant number of egg yolks.

According to The Encyclopedia of Pasta, a fantastic book by Oretta Zanini de Vita, it is a Piedmontese style of pasta that is, typically, wheat flour, eggs or just egg yolks, a touch of olive oil and a pinch of salt. There are many versions of tajarin, but I stick to this general guideline.

I did pick up a little tip from another great book, Mastering Pasta by Marc Vetri, where he mixes in a little durum flour with the regular wheat flour. This adds extra bite to the pasta.

To be clear, this is not durum semolina, it’s a more finely milled durum flour that isn’t easy to find — but I did get some at Caputo’s in Salt Lake City. You can buy it online, or skip it.

So Many Yolks

OK, I get it. Tajarin is an extravagant pasta. My recipe calls for 10 egg yolks to serve maybe four people. I’ve seen a few recipes with more than that. Spendy.

But, here’s the thing: I only make tajarin when I am yolk rich. In most cases, it means I’ve been making consomme, which requires egg whites to clarify the broth. For meringue lovers, there ya go.

Or, you can say screw it and lay waste to a whole carton and figure out what to do with the whites later. One option is embedded within the tajarin tradition: There’s a complementary pasta called “sheets and linens” that uses, you guessed it, only the whites. This one isn’t as rich, so it’s more of a work night pasta.

What you can also do is save up yolks and freeze them. You will need to salt them — just salt the yolks as if you were going to eat them — then put in a lidded container and freeze. They will thaw as a weird goo, but it works fine in the pasta dough.

Tajarin’s shape

It’s basically tagliolini, which is, more or less, square spaghetti. You can hand cut them, all old school, or you can use the tagliolini cutter on your pasta machine — chances are it’s listed as a spaghetti cutter, but spaghetti is round.

Or, you can make tajarin on a chitarra. I have a whole tutorial on this whimsical pasta-making device, and yeah, I have one. I got lotsa pasta toys…

Bottom line is tajarin is thin.

Saucing tajarin

According to Zanini de Vita, the traditional sauce for tajarin is a rich ragu of giblets from poultry and/or rabbits. Turns out I happen to have a recipe for a giblet bolognese here on this site, so you can use that.

Other excellent sauces for this pasta include:

• A game meat sugo or ragu, which is a hearty, meat-based sauce. I have a duck sugo, a venison ragu, and a really meaty sugo made with dark-meat birds like doves, squab, or sharp-tailed grouse.
• Or go vegetarian with a big mushroom pasta sauce.
• You could use tajarin as the pasta for pasta primavera, or with my crab sauce.
• Tajarin is also fantastic tossed with any sort of pesto. I have a nice parsley and walnut pesto, a red pesto, and wild pestos like ramp pesto or nettle pesto.

Or you can just saute some onions and garlic in olive oil, add herbs and greens, maybe some blanched green beans or shelly beans, a splash of lemon and black pepper. That’s what I did in the picture.

Storing Tajarin

You can store tajarin a few hours in little nests like the picture. But for longer term storage, you will want to lay the pasta out straight, ideally not touching, and let this dry in the fridge or a cool room.

It will get brittle, so be careful when you pick up the dried pasta. Store it in a container where it can lie flat.

If this sounds like a hassle, it is. Tajarin is meant to be a fresh pasta, and doesn’t take long to make, so my recommendation is to make it and eat it fresh.

If you liked this recipe, please leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ rating and a comment below; I’d love to hear how everything went. If you’re on Instagram, share a picture and tag me at huntgathercook.