Monograno Felicetti

Dear {NOMEUTENTE}
Pasta, Pizza and Rice, the three giants of Italian cuisine, will be greatly celebrated during Identità Golose 2011. First of all pasta, on Sunday January 30, with a day which will be the ideal prosecution of the wonderful one of the last edition when, for security reasons, the Sala Bianca was closed due to excessive crowd. The program will be ready in a few days. The state of grace of Italian chefs is such that they can widen even the frontiers of a masterpiece which we thought to know everything about.
Paolo Marchi

Texts by Gabriele Zanatta
 

On January 17 the world will smell of basil

There can be no doubt: there is no more universally known Italian pasta than Spaghetti with tomato sauce. There is a wide choice for the second rank and answers are influenced by the territory where the root is taken: Matriciana or Norma? Carbonara or Cacio e pepe? Tagliatelle or Lasagne? Being native of Milan, I have to adopt a first course made of pasta and the answer is: Trenette with pesto, made of basil. Therefore the region Liguria, a lasting memory because when I was a teenager, during the Sixties/Seventies, the pesto belonged to the wealth of “ethnical” delicacies of each of us. Industry hadn’t adopted and popularized it yet and the pasta with pesto could be found only in Levanto, Alassio or other Liguria towns.

Today green pesto is made in the four corners of the planet and goodness knows which news we are going to read from now till mid January. For the fourth Giornata dell’Orgoglio della Cucina Italiana (Day of the Italian Cuisine Pride), organized on January 17 by GVCI, the Gruppo Virtuale Cuochi Italiani (Virtual Group of Italian Chefs), president Mario Caramella, creator of the reference recipe.

Pesto after Carbonara, Risotto with saffron and Tagliatelle with ragout. Again a first course dish and it’s right because the meal characterizes us Italians. In a month, on Monday January 17, about 1,200 chefs and fans will prepare Pasta with pesto in about seventy different nations. Everyone is free to take part from home, then loading the pictures on a blog or on facebook. To participate write to idic2011@itchefs-gvci.com.
And here the right shapes are also mentioned. Too bad they don’t mention lasagne, extremely elegant and rarely heavy as often are those with ragout. Frankly speaking, I’m not so fond of trofie and avoid adding potatoes, while I like French beans. I also thanks I didn’t know the pasta advantagée, with bran added to the flour mixture, a way to struggle poverty. However, I must admit that I’m very fond of pizzoccheri (buckwheat tagliatelle) with pesto.
p.mar.
 

Damiano Nigro and spicy steamed dumplings

Starred or not (the first star arrived 3 weeks ago), Damiano Nigro from Brindisi has been going on doing the same since 4 years ago, when he was entrusted with the helm of Villa D’Amelia in Benevello, in the heart of Langhe. A moderate change, because here creative inspiration cannot be used too much.

However, the fuse of inspiration is always lit. And clearly visible in the work done with first course dishes. If Christmas menu proposes reassuring Capon dumplings with broth, the New Year Eve one is «spent not with the family as Christmas but where you choose» meaning that it’s a sort of escape from gastronomical prisons (even though golden ones). The old year will be closed with Bologna sausage dumplings with young squids and clams, «a souvenir», he tells, «of the bread with Bologna sausage of my youth. Not to waste the taste of the latter, the dough of the dumplings is made only with flour and water and the bread used for the stuffing is softened in milk for a while. Then I sauté the young squids separately with chive and ginger and prepare the clams in a stew of garlic and thyme».

The real innovation is the way of cooking the dumplings, which the 37 years old chef doesn’t plunge into the water but steams, «so the dough always remains intact and maintains a certain harmony». He does this with every kind of stuffed pasta, including the agnolotti del plin. However the best still has to come: «We are conceiving a steamer which gives off aromatized steams for cooking: we are trying star anise for the duck dumplings, ginger or lemongrass for fish ones and almonds for scampi». Waiting for the set up of the equipment there is time until Epiphany , when the restaurant is going to close for winter, to taste the Agnolotti del plin, the Tajarin with sausage ragout or the Bavette with Sicilian scampi.
 

Christmas with eggs by Massimiliano Alajmo

The chef Massimiliano Alajmo of the Calandre in Rubano (Pd) doesn’t think immediately of a first course dish when talking about the dual concept pasta and Christmas: «Instinctively», he explains, «I think of leavened dough, which mainly means panettone (light Christmas cake), loafs and pan d’olio, the pandoro we make without butter or other dairy products». We had read about it also on Foodtripper, a site which gathers all Christmas desires of ten celebrity chefs from all around the world, from Ferran Adrià to Mathias Dahlgren. We have read that upon waking up on the 25th Alajmo most of all would like to find a 3 kilo panettone under the tree.

And what we of Identità di Pasta would like to find at Calandre? What is now written in the tasting menu could already be very good: Bent dumplings with raw fish and clams and mussel sauce or Spaghetti with garlic, oil, chili pepper and oysters. However, at the moment the chef devotes all its attention to the aromatized egg pasta, the newborn of the line In.gredienti, a sort of delicacy shop made in Rubano. There are six kinds of egg pasta, all made with the dough rolled by hand and obtained from Italian bran flour and fresh eggs shelled right away. The most suitable for Christmas of the six is «the Haiti Komet coffee tagliolino or the "gocciolato" dumpling to cook with smoked pumpkin broth». The other 5 varieties: bigoli with wheat germ (in the picture but temporarily «all gone», we read on the site), Maltagliati with smoked sweet paprika, curry and curcuma, smoked tagliatelle and dill tagliatelle. Which sauce for each of them? «Butter and Parmesan cheese for all. White fish or vegetable ragout for the dill one, game or mushrooms for the maltagliati».
 

Linguine in Libya and other Arabic-Mediterranean stories

The picture beside shows traditional Linguine with lamb, tomato and green peppers. It is published in the book Bismilla Arabia, signed together by Merijn Tol and Nadia Zerouali, Dutch correspondents for the guide Guida di Identità Golose. A recipe from Sardinia or Calabria? None of the two: from Libya. Because, as the subhead of the book implicitly reminds - "The cuisines of Palestine, Israel, Turkey, Sardinia, Catalonia, Libya and Algeria" – when we talk about Mediterranean cuisine we refer to Italy, France or Spain as if all the countries facing the Mare nostrum, mainly those having an Arabic tradition, were there as negligible walkers-on.

The linguine in the picture are clearly a consequence of the Italian colonization of Tripolitania and Cirenaica (1911-1943), which became Libya in 1934. From the gigantic compensation to the colonel Gaddafi our Prime Minister should have deducted the legacy of pasta, «still very much cooked in Tripoli and its surroundings», the two Dutch authors explain, «the dry one obtained from durum wheat is very popular but also egg tagliatelle are successful. The big difference is that they don’t cook it into the water, but directly into the sauce which can be very spicy». «The Italian influence», Tol and Zerouali explain «is still very evident in the unrestrained consumption of coffee by the Libyans and their passion for Italian shoes». The book can be bought online here or in Dutch bookstores.
 

Felicetti and one year intensely lived (to be lived)

For the Felicetti pasta-factory, 2010 has been a year to remember: the day fully devoted to pasta at the Milan congress Identità di Pasta in January, the launch of the homonymous newsletter, the days at Identità London, which had their peak with the extraordinary performance on the versatility of pasta by the chef Davide Scabin from Turin (picture by Alessandro Castiglioni)… An intensely lived year.

But mainly an year which has to be the necessary premise for the following one, a 2011 that Riccardo Felicetti, who from January the 1st will replace Massimo Menna of Pasta Garofalo as president of Unipi, Unione industriale pastai italiani, hopes to be of fundamental importance for the whole sector: «I hope», he wishes, «that the year 2011 can go on in the groove traced over the last 12 months: that the chefs can go on finding creative inspirations in interpreting pasta, that food-bloggers and pasta-lovers can go on looking for important spurs in its use. And that all pasta-manufacturers, from the Dolomites to Gragnano, can go on with their fruitful research works about substance, shapes but also about the study of packaging to definitely declare pasta as the main ambassador of the “most authentic made in Italy”.
 

Eating (and digesting) well: the book of recipes by Sognatori

Once upon a time there was the soup of chestnuts and chick-peas from the Abruzzi, the mixed soups with capon broth in Campania, the cavatelli with mussels and beans from Apulia. This allowed spending the whole Christmas week skipping from one region to another in the South of Italy. Employing the same time to digest, in all probability. Gone the times of the post-war famine, of the more the better, the new generation of chefs finally focuses on lighter dishes concentrating taste in more reduced spaces even though much more explosive. They feed the stomach as well as the thought.

One of the most interesting Christmas book of recipes online in these days is signed by Sognatori del Gusto, a downloadable pdf with a Christmas menu written by 24 hands- They are 12 young chefs from 11 restaurants in the South of Italy and many of them are already known to those who read these newsletters: Nicola Fossaceca, Vincenzo Politelli, Marco Gallotta, Fabrizio Sepe, Vincenzo Candiano, Pietro D’Agostino, Valerio Centofanti, Domenico Colonnetta and Francesco Patti. The dishes in the menu are 11 altogether: they go from Raw stockfish with orange and fennels to the Pistachio hot pie with torrone ice cream.

And what about pasta dishes? They are three: Fettuccine with large eel, small tomatoes from Vesuvio and mint by Marianna Vitale (in the picture by Alessandro Castiglioni), chef of the restaurant Sud in Quarto (Naples, telephone number 081.0202708), the sea spider tortelli with tomato juice and basil infusion by Enrico Pierri, Neapolitan chef of the Sanlorenzo in Rome and Black fettuccine with stockfish and dry pepper by Michele Rotondo of the Masseria Petrino in Palagianello (Ta).
 

RECIPE/The Tagliatelle with panettone by Fabrizio Ferrari

The Tagliatelle with panettone with white veal ragout by Fabrizio Ferrari of the Roof Garden in Bergamo, a recipe drawn from the book i>Mille e un… panettone by Trenta editore, and realized in co-operation with Loison.

Recipe for 6 persons

For the dough
400 g of white flour
220 g of panettone
6 eggs

For the veal ragout
200 g of chopped veal lean
1 celery
1 carrot
1 medium onion
20 g of butter
2 table spoons of oil
1 branchlet of sweet marjoram
1 glass of dry white wine
salt and black pepper
Vegetable broth

Procedure
Whip together in a mixer the panettone, the flour and the eggs; remove the obtained dough and keep it covered in the cool for 30 minutes. Roll it out to obtain tagliatelle of medium size.
Separately prepare a stuffing of carrot, celery and onion and have it brown with a bit of butter; in a separate pot fry slowly the veal lean in oil and, when cooked, join it to the stuffing. Add the white wine, regulate salt and pepper and simmer for one and a half hour, adding a kitchen spoon of vegetable broth if necessary.
Have salty water boil, cook the tagliatelle then drain them and pour them in the pan with the ragout: flavor with grated Grana Padano cheese and serve sprinkling the dishes with crunchy crumbs of panettone.
 

The Rigatoni with pore mushrooms and lentisk resin by Carlo Cracco

The Rigatoni with mastic and raw pore mushrooms, moving and intense first course exalted by the lentisk resin, discovered on the Greek island of Chios by Carlo Cracco, chef of the Ristorante Cracco in Milan (picture by Paolo Marchi).