Dear {NOMEUTENTE}in June, I have spent almost ten days in Shanghai, at the Pavillion Italia of the Chinese Expo, to manage a series of classes and dinners devoted to the best the restaurant industry of Milan can offer today, invited by the Municipality of Milan which I thank for the opportunity given to us of Identità, an experience I have described in Marchidigola and I will deepen soon in another newsletter.
The borders were those of the city with the Duomo, the Scala Theater and the yellow risotto and this explains why rice prevailed over pasta. I remember a personal interpretation by Elio Sironi of her majesty Pasta alla Carbonara and the Ravioli golosi golosi by Giacomo Gallina, but I remember too the hardly sufficient pasta in the restaurant that is presented as the best Italian restaurant of Shanghai.
Unfortunately, very often we Italians abroad do not go beyond a decorous duty, being happy that in any case many people love the made-in-Italy which makes us believe to be winning. We actually are so, but often because we choose a sort of lonely run without comparing ourselves with the other world great cuisines.
Those who have followed our events at the Expo, chefs, journalists and lovers, Chinese but also Italians, French, foreigners in China, wanted to know everything about the recipes, showing to have understood that we don’t have only a pleasant cuisine but that typical aspects of it, such as the underdone pasta, can become winning aces. Provided that we aren’t satisfied with little.
Paolo Marchi
Texts by Gabriele Zanatta |
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When a ravioli is stuffed with fish: Ciotti and RizzutiThe item “ravioli” in Wikipedia has certainly been edited in winter. In fact, they do not mention summer habits of super chefs who all take a single way to lighten recipes which would be too heavy with hot weather: fish stuffing.
To Stefano Ciotti[link] of the [link=http://www.carducci76.it/it/ristorantevicolosantalucia/index.asp]Vicolo Santa Lucia, the restaurant of the Carducci 76 hotel in Cattolica there is only one kind of pasta: stuffed pasta. No spaghetti “with”, only raviolis “stuffed with”. The “Bis di ravioli l’uno per l’altro” in the picture alternates a yellow traditional ravioli (flour, eggs, salt and oil) and a green one obtained by adding caro dei lanaioli to the mixture, a sort of spontaneous beetroot used also to card sheep’s wool. The relevant fillings are different too even though both are made with one of the most popular fish. The first one contains a whipped fresh turbot stuffing, sieved and dressed with fresh dill, Grana Padano cheese and white pepper. The second one contains a turbot juice, which remains outside when cooking baked turbot but here is stuck in the pasta. Checkered in the dish, they are served with a turbot slice above and comfit small tomatoes as garnish.
Going to the South, the idea is the same: be he at the helm of the Antica Osteria Marconi in Potenza or of Dattilo in Strongoli, the best Calabrian restaurant, the chef Francesco Rizzuti too proposes raviolis filled with fish: in Basilicata they are filled with dried cod dressed with oil, chili pepper and garlic, and are placed on a salad made of beans from Sarconi dressed with oil from Vulture, raw onion, chips of sweet peppers from Senise and lemon. In the Crotone area, they are made of just parboiled egg puff-pastry matched to an Ionian raw red crawfish tartare with lemon over raw whipped peas with onion from Tropea. The sauce is made with sardella (whitebaits) from Crucoli. Not to make the crawfish feel too lost.
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Peter Brunel and the rehydration of dried pasta Peter Brunel is a chef coming from Val di Fassa in Trentino Alto Adige with many brewing projects. They will soon show up and you will know. Now we want to remind an interesting technique the boy has shown during the last Milan’s congress of Identità.
The rehydration of dried pasta, «a stratagem» he tells us, «originated from observing the preservation of dried legumes: we know that beans are dried to keep them. Then they are cooked in a bain-maire when have to be used». Eureka: why not doing the same also with durum wheat or kamut pasta always dried by pasta-factories ( even though using different times and ways)? After several trial and error processes, here is the solution: « to rehydrate dried pasta put it in water at a temperature ranging between 20 and 30°C». Do not exceed this range: « if you go beyond 30 degrees pasta stews if you go below 20 degrees it takes too much time, as it happens to pizza leavenings made with cold water. The total time is a little hour, varying according to the chosen temperature». The result is a sort of durum wheat pasta with the consistency of fresh pasta, where starches are well stuck inside and not dispersed.
And what about the dish/cocotte in the picture by Brambilla/Serrani? They are his Kamut spaghetti rehydrated into source water from Trentino Alto Adige. The bordeaux red color comes from cooking the pasta in the Teroldego Redondel wine (which has a meaning also in the glass). The sauce is a ragout made of red char expressly smoked under a film.
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Riccioli and the City: garlic, oil and chili pepper For decades, many people on a trip to Rome with a long for fish have had a stop at La Rosetta of Massimo Riccioli. Thanks also to his first courses of pasta, classical and heavenly. It happens that the chef is preparing to land beyond the English Channel in January 2011, to the Corinthia. The first jimmy to force the British palates is pasta with garlic, oil and chili pepper, «the base of any sea cooking dish», he lights up. Let’s see how. First of all pasta: «For 6-7 years I have been using a lot of Felicetti emmer spaghetti: they are an excellent alternative to durum wheat pasta because sugars are kept under control and they absorb well the tastes of the sauce. They are also extremely healthy. In short, they don’t make you feel guilty», he smiles.
The sauce: «garlic is the keystone to build the taste: I use red garlic to make oil tasty. I cook it also with little water to remove its excessive stink that may bother. Once the water has evaporated, I take the garlic away. Instead chili pepper shall not be hot but tasty. I grind it in the coffee grinder with its seeds, which contain the tastiest part. It is a very dynamic base in the mouth». At Identità London, a bit more than one month ago, he added also parsley (the clear green dots in the picture by Brambilla/Serrani), a detail which isn’t much appreciated by the gourmet of the last generation: «while instead we have to acknowledge to parsley the right vegetable value, refreshing and primary to give balance to tastes», Riccioli explains.
After fixing the lintel, it’s time for the fish wall: in London it was a thinly sliced octopus, pickled instead of cooked into the three ingredients to avoid gummy consistencies. But it can be also scallops or whatever. So the British, after forgetting the unlucky Football World Cup, can again exult at the feats of an Italian.
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What we mean when we say Monograno (single grain) There is a word that is increasingly populating the lexicon of pasta-lovers: monograno (single grain). What does it mean? In principle, cultivating a single variety of cereal in the environment and land that are considered to be the most suitable. However, meanings have shades that change according to the persons who interpret them.
Riccardo Felicetti of the pasta-factory Felicetti in Predazzo (Tn) started working on this concept in 2000-2001 with a team of farmers, millers and scientists, obtaining the first examples of pasta from a single variety of cereal three years later. All started borrowing the concept from the vine-growing of his region: «There is a very deep similarity», he explains, «between a wine from autochthonous pure grapes such as lagrein or nosiola and pasta from a selected single variety, which is not the result of a mixture of cereals».
To find the right variety, however, studies and extremely rigorous applications are needed: «we have tried grains which often were not up to the standard, we went also through moments of disappointment, needed in a way towards excellence». And necessary to create kamut, emmer and durum wheat, the three Felicetti single varieties on sale up to now “obtained following the methods of biological agriculture, an important optional which excludes the use of any chemical fertilizer and plant protection product and increases the land fertility only exploiting the biological cycles of organic energy». The result is all in the smells, consistency and versatility of the obtained products. And they are going to study a fourth grain for single variety selection.
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Here is the white spaghetti (with tomato) by Heinz Beck The picture on the left by Brambilla/Serrani finally presents the most persistent pasta-cult of recent times. It shows the spaghetti with clams that Heinz Beck of the Pergola in Rome and the Apsleys in London has presented at Vinopolis.
Why are they a cult? Let’s sum up with Paolo Marchi:
«Beck uses a double boiling, a relay race between a first 4 minute cooking in the classical boiling water (with little salt) and a second 5/6 minute boiling into already salted tomato water. ‘I noticed that in Italy there is no certainty about pasta with clams (even if at the restaurant I prefer Venus clams): some love it white, others red for the tomato sauce. This is why I thought to propose white spaghetti but with the taste of tomato. It’s enough to boil them in the tomato water I obtain having small ripe tomatoes from Ischia drain for one night after having minced them and gathered them in a suspended dishcloth’, the Italian/German chef has explained. The result deserves a standing ovation: the smell is such that after the first forkful, you ask yourself where he has hidden tomatoes, a real magic. All completed with a sauce made of basil and parsley, a tricolor made of two colors».
Customers at the restaurant already ask for: «a dish of white spaghetti with clams, but with tomato». The waiters are bewildered.
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RECIPE 1/Spaghetti with cuttle-fish ink by Alessandro Gilmozzi The Spaghetti with cuttle-fish ink and oyster mayonnaise, a new entry in the menu of Alessandro Gilmozzi, chef of the Molin in Cavalese (Tn), especially devoted to «the great Davide Scabin, who opened my mind also to the Felicetti 25 Shape Pasta ».
Ingredients for 4 persons
200 g of Felicetti pasta with cuttle-ink fish
1 liter of water
50 g of clean oysters
10 g of extra-virgin olive oil from Garda
100 g of mineral water
2 g of smoked salt
Sheep’s sorrel
Procedure
Clean the oysters and keep the water. Freeze in the pacojet to -22°C, pacotize and filter with a strainer. Clear and keep only the water. Then emulsify water with oil.
For the salted and smoked water:
Take water to 70°C, dissolve salt and then cool. Then create a spray.
For the pasta
Boil for 2 minutes and infuse for another 7 minutes. Keep at room temperature. Then dress with the oyster emulsion and the smoked spray.
Serve with 3-4 leaves of sheep’s sorrel to create a rather sour note.
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RECIPE 2/The anchovy taglierini by Davide Cannavino The Taglierini mixed with anchovies, pine-seeds and “poor” fish, the latter being a distinctive element of Davide Cannavino, young chef of Voglia Matta in Genova Voltri.
Ingredients for 4 persons
For the pasta
50 g of durum wheat flour
180 g of water
40 g of salty anchovies
For the sauce
1 clove of garlic
3 small tomatoes without peel
25 g of pine-seeds
120 g of “poor” fish (it can be horse mackerel, mackerel, striped bream, sargo, red-sea bream, Spanish mackerel) filleted and boned
10 g of bread of the previous day, coarsely grinded
oil, salt, pepper
Procedure
For the mixture
Wash well the anchovies from salt, bone and grind them. Mix flour with water and anchovies. Roll out the mixture and cut it 26 cm long. Draw with the cutter.
Sauce
The sauce shall be rigorously made expressly, it is very simple and quick.
Put the taglierini into salty water and proceeds as follows during the 3 minutes of cooking:
Put sliced garlic and extra-virgin olive oil into a pan. When the oil is hot, add the small tomatoes, the pine-seeds and the grated bread. Sauté for a few seconds then add the coarsely julienne cut fish. Drain the pasta, sauté in the pan, add pepper and salt.
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Seen from above: shake shells by Davide Scabin The small tube of Shake Shells (a variation of the Shake Ravioli, a classic dish of the chef) with bagna caoda (hot savory containing anchovy and garlic) and peppers by Davide Scabin, chef of the Combal.zero in Rivoli, Turin. Dish presented in London in June 2010. Picture by Alessandro Castiglioni. |
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