Shannon Martinez first made this dish to alleviate a hangover.

“I had too many bottles of wine on a big night out,” says the owner and chef from Smith & Daughters in Melbourne.

She wanted carbs and cheese, but given her fragile state, she also wanted it quickly. This one-pot wonder ticked all the boxes – the tubetti are cooked directly in a brodo (broth) of vegetable stock, white wine, fennel, chickpeas and radicchio.

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Smith & Daughters is a vegan restaurant with a rock’n’roll attitude. This was one of the first dishes Martinez thought of for the Italian menu, which debuted abruptly in May 2018 after four years of Latin-influenced food. Preparing a vegan Italian menu was easy, she says.

“Italian food’s got some pretty epic vegan food. One example is with the more peasant-style dishes, some of which use garlic bread crumbs instead of parmesan cheese, because it was all they could afford.”

She’s firm that hearty, comforting fare can be made sans animal products, this recipe being one such example. “It’s perfect one-pan, one-bowl, on-the-couch-with-a-blanket sort of food,” she says.

Tubetti with braised fennel, radicchio and chickpeas, by Shannon Martinez
Preparation time: 10 minutes
Cooking time: 15 minutes
Serves 4

Ingredients
125ml extra-virgin olive oil, plus more to finish
150g radicchio, roughly chopped
½ brown onion, thinly sliced
½ fennel bulb, core removed, thinly sliced
3 cloves garlic, sliced
400g canned chickpeas
½ tsp chilli flakes
80ml white wine
150g tubetti pasta
750ml vegetable stock
Small handful parsley, roughly chopped
25g vegan parmesan or Parmigiano Reggiano, grated, plus extra to finish

Method
In a deep, lidded pan or a shallow Dutch oven heat the oil over medium heat. Add the onion, fennel and radicchio. Season with salt and pepper and cook until just beginning to turn golden.

Add the garlic, chickpeas and chilli flakes and cook off for a minute before deglazing the pan with white wine.

Add the stock and bring to the boil. Add the tubetti, reduce to a simmer and cover. Check every couple minutes to make sure it’s not sticking to the bottom of the pan.

Once the pasta is al dente, remove the lid, check seasoning and adjust if needed. Add a splash of stock if necessary. This dish is somewhere between a soup and a pasta, so keep it brothy.

Add a quarter cup parmesan and stir until melted through. Finish the dish with parsley, a generous grating of fresh parmesan and a big splash of olive oil.

This is an extract from The Broadsheet Italian Cookbook, which features 80 recipes from Australia's best restaurants, cafes and bars.