Dear {NOMEUTENTE}Obviously there are exceptions, Tuscany for instance doesn’t seem to me much tuned up with underdone pasta and Milan can be better matched to risotto, but however there is no doubt that Italy as a whole is a country with a strong bent for pasta. We at Identità are realizing it now that we are preparing the schedule for Identità New York within Eataly from October 12 to 14. The question «which pasta are the chefs going to prepare?» is always in the air because nobody can imagine an Italian menu without it. And everybody is expecting miracles in the dish instead of the usual spaghetti floating in a lake of tomato sauce made with tomato purée, everlasting refuge of tired or ordinary chefs.
Italian pasta, after obscuring the image of meat often wrongly bombarded by several sides, can get on in the diet of the Rest of the world because it is true that carbohydrates as first course belong to our diet but if proteins are taken away, why not commit strongly to extend the borders of spaghetti and lasagna? We lack common feeling and action. A typical situation.
Paolo Marchi
Texts by Gabriele Zanatta
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Christian Costardi and the pasta-rice crossing What you see in the picture is Venere brown rice. What does it have to do with Identità di Pasta? It has to do with it because it is the only known link between rice and pasta, two illustrious parallel lines always reluctant to cross. However, sometimes it happens that they converge: the Venere rice flour is used by some pasta-makers of Eastern Piedmont to shape dough, mixed in different percentages to durum wheat semolina. The mixture has aroused interest in Christian Costardi of the restaurant Cinzia, «because it is pasta with the taste of rice». Like fresh pasta, it requires only few minutes of cooking and the chef has always served it simply with fish/citrus fruits: bisque of shrimps and lemon peel.
By the way, those who are looking to the 32-year-old chef from Vercelli as the king of risotto (as he actually is) should try his gifts about pasta. At present, the menu offers 3 alternatives. The Raviolo monferrino dedicated to Grandma Sandra «filled with fillet of beef and veal instead of the classical roast». Then Linguine with oysters, lemon and mint, a dish which produces a Righeira-style melancholy as it will soon disappear from the menu with the end of summer. Simply explosive freshness.
To end with pasta made with rich ingredients: Raviolone (Big raviolo) filled with European lobster, little spinaches and foie gras. «I made it for the first time in 2003», the chef recalls, «at the feast of the Redeemer when I worked at the Westin Europa Regina in Venice. I wanted to use these two ingredients, so close for aristocracy but so far for taste, together». The raviolo is the perfect cushion to harmonize the fattiness of the foie gras and the iodate of the shellfish. «Careful to cooking: never cook it in boiling water to prevent the pasta from flaking».
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Everything about Pierogi, the Poland filled pasta Today we talk a lot about dumpling but there isn’t one single meaning of this term because, as Wikipedia sums up well, filled dough can be made with flour, potatoes or bread. And it may be stuffed with meat, fish, sweet or fruit alike. Then we can boil it, steam it , fry it or put it in the oven… This is why it would have more sense to go back to the roots of a gesture which, at the same time and with apparently no connection, as the pyramids built by the Egyptians in Africa and the Maya in Central America, relates Jewish and Mongolians, natives of the Romagna and Japanese, Scandinavians and Tibetans: eat a food contained in warmed up dough.
Let’s leave this research to the taste archeologists and linger a bit over the pierogi, the dumplings of the Eastern countries: they fill the dishes of riches and poor people in Hungary, Slovakia, Ukraine, Russia… We have studied them from their “origins”: these ravioli of unleavened dough appear for the first time in the late Middle Age courts of Poland. Eight hundred years later they are the absolute icon of Poland cuisine, both within the country and around the world (there are about 2 million Polish emigrates).
The dough is almost always made with flour, water and eggs. If according to tradition the coverings are too big and “kill” the filling, some are working to make them thinner (for instance the chef Adam Chrzastowski in Cracovia and Pawel Oszczyk in Warsaw). The stuffing can be of a trillion different kinds: in Cracow, which hosts a crowded Pierogi Festival in the August holiday, people are crazy for those filled with fresh cheese, smashed potatoes and fried onions; the most conservative ones prefer those with stewed meat or with cabbage and mushrooms. The most adherent to the light dictates of contemporary life try those with crab meat. In summer months fruit pontificates: plums (in the picture by Gabriele Zanatta), blackberries, strawberries… Enough to come back home and launch the trend.
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Felicetti and the why and wherefore of extrusion We are Italians and know everything about pasta but do we know how to make holes to rigatoni?
Riccardo Felicetti from the Pastificio Felicetti in Predazzo (here with Eugenio Pol, in the picture by Alessandro Castiglioni) sums up to us one of the most important moment in the process of pasta-making: extrusion.
«The final shape of a dough compressed using a press», he explains, «passes through an extruder. Therefore, the relationship between pasta-maker and extruder manufacturer becomes crucial because they are joined by a common need: have the dough take the desired shape without spoiling its mechanical characteristics».
The parts of an extruder: «The ingot is generally made of bronze, a solid and resistant alloy able to evenly support the pressures of the system. The inserts, generally made of Teflon or bronze, convey the dough towards the exit through micro holes placed with a microscopic precision to allow the fluid to flow outside. The positions of the holes, which are all perfectly equal along the extruder, allow for the dough come down parallel or make it bend or roll with homogeneity».
Therefore, great precision and understanding are needed: «The master pasta-makers choose the thickness, striping and wideness of the fusilli spirals. The great extruder manufacturers create engineering masterpieces to keep the quality of pasta always high. They work with numerical control machines because they are aware that the difference of a tenth of millimeter between an insert and the other causes a difference of about 40 seconds in the cooking time. Magic of technology which helps us pasta makers proposing precious products».
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RECIPE 1/The linguine by Antonino Cannavacciuolo The Linguine of Gragnano, young squids and Fobello bread sauce by Tonino Cannavacciuolo, chef at Villa Crespi in Orta San Giulio, Novara (picture by Brambilla/Serrani).
Linguine
500 g of linguine of Gragnano
Young squids
10 medium-size young squids
1 l fish broth
2 cloves of garlic
Extra-virgin olive oil
Salt and pepper
Pachino small tomatoes
Parsley
Have the two cloves of garlic brown, add the round cut squids and quickly pan-fry them. Add fish broth, extra-virgin olive oil, salt and pepper. Cook the linguine in salty water and finish cooking in the pan. Once cooked, add the squids, the parsley and the small tomatoes. Using a colander and pliers create a nest and place it in the middle of the dish. Add the bread sauce around the linguine and finally place the squids on top of the linguine.
Bread sauce
1 Fobello bread by Eugenio Pol
2 shallots
6 branchlets of thyme
1 l chicken broth
Salt and pepper
Extra-virgin olive oil
White wine
Cut the bread in small cubes and toast it in the oven. Brown the julienne cut shallot with oil and thyme. Add the bread, simmer with white wine and sprinkle with chicken broth. At the end of cooking, whip and pass through the thin strainer.
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RECIPE 2/“Spaghetti”ice-cream by Luca Landi “Iced Identità”: Garlic, oil and chili pepper spaghetti by Luca Landi, chef of the Lunasia of the Green Park Resort in Tirrenia, Pisa (picture Brambilla/Serrani).
Cuttlefish spaghetti
500 g eviscerated and peeled cuttlefish
50 g mascarpone
50 g new extra-virgin olive oil
Salt and pepper qs
Roast half of the cuttlefish and add it to the raw one, whip well and season with mascarpone, oil, salt, pepper and lay them on a one millimeter thick sheet of oven paper. Place it in the oven at 90°C for about 20 minutes. Cut the cuttlefish thin layer obtained into 20x10 cm rectangles. Once cold, cut it “alla chitarra” obtaining the spaghetti.
Parsley bread crumbs
Stale Tuscan bread
Salt and pepper
Extra-virgin olive oil
Chopped parsley
Remove the crust from the bread and pass it into the cutter to obtain not too small crumbs. Fry-pan them with extra-virgin olive oil until they are crunchy. Season with salt, pepper and chopped parsley.
Garlic, oil and chili pepper ice cream
594 g mineral water
10 g milk proteins
105 g powdered skim milk
130 g dextrose
100 g new extra-virgin olive oil
5 g fresh garlic
0,5 g dry chili pepper
6 g salt
6 g neutral cream
50 g maltodextrin 18 de
Mix all the dry weighed ingredients and dissolve them in water. Separately, warm up little oil from the weighed quantity and have the thinly sliced garlic and chili pepper brown. Add the browned ingredients to the ice cream basis and pasteurize at 83°C. Cool and mature for 12 hours in the fridge. Keep the remaining oil which will be added into the ice-cream machine only in the whipping phase.
Serving
Slightly fry-pan the spaghetti in the oil and wrap them around a cone obtained with a bread thin layer to be filled with a cylinder of ice cream. Finish with the bread crumbs. Decorate with fried parsley.
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The raviolo with sheep’s milk cheese and maigre by Mattei The Raviolo with extra-virgin olive oil, sheep’s milk cheese, pepper and maigre by Andrea Mattei from the restaurant La Magnolia of Hotel Byron, dish presented at Identità Golose 2010 (picture Brambilla/Serrani). |
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