Dear {NOMEUTENTE}It will be up to Davide Scabin to close Identità di Pasta in two weeks’ time, on Sunday January 30 in the Sala Blu, one year after the success obtained by the same subject, pasta, at Identità Golose. In 2010 the crucial point was the center of attention, that is the perfect cooking of spaghetti and macaroni, that al dente (underdone) which distinguishes us from the rest of the world and about which we have difficulty to come to an agreement. Alain Ducasse said that he would have never opened a gourmet restaurant in our Country “because we haven’t yet come to an agreement on the cooking time of pasta”. However, this variety of thoughts and ways represents a wealth which does us honor, provided that it isn’t the result of improvisation and superficiality. This time at Identità di Pasta we will pay more attention to taste, combinations, and shapes and for this I thank all those who will take part in it with enthusiasm and competence.
Paolo Marchi
Texts by Gabriele Zanatta
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Cracco and Baronetto for a masterpiece dish Over the last few months there has been no dish which excited me more than the Rigatoni con mastica e funghi porcini crudi (Rigatoni with mastic and raw pore mushrooms) that we can admire in a beautiful picture. I have already written about it, among blogs and pasta newsletters, because the framework on which Carlo Cracco (here told by Roberto Perrone whom I thank) and Matteo Baronetto (the report is by Alessandra Meldolesi whom I thank too) synthesize two apparently very far tastes, the lentisk resin and the king of mushrooms, is a very classical pasta; the resin reaches us from the Greek island of Chios and pore mushrooms are a jewel from our mountains.
Apparently far away because nobody, when walking in the woods, is surprised at having his/her hands sticky after putting them on a tree branch or trunk covered with resin, fragrant and irritating. But the mastic comes from Chios, with Turkey immediately beyond the sea, the charm of far away waves which Cracco has brought to Milan that isn’t certainly a natural city and where a lot has to be dreamt in a sort of mental and emotional escape. I hope that for the class on January 30 at 11.30 am in the Sala Blu there will be pore mushrooms up to it. It isn’t the right season for them and it isn’t a matter of taking a good picture using an imported product but rather going to the source of a masterpiece dish.
pmar
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After-hours pasta by Elio Sironi Raising eyes to heaven happens to the executive chef of a luxury hotel more often than to others. In fact, the customer’s fit knows no time: each minute in the double turn of the clock hands is good to order the impossible. Elio Sironi of the Bulgari in Milan knows this mechanism well. For this reason he is going to open the Identità di Pasta session in the Sala Blu at 10.30 am with a special subject: “After-hours pasta”.
The Milanese chef is not going to tell us how to comply with the mincing ways or the chemical night hunger of odd clients, but he will explore a precise thesis supported by the scientific opinion of a nutritionist: pasta for breakfast. Not the perfect pasta dish to eat still wearing a bathrobe, but pasta to spread, an idea not strange at all because Sironi anticipates «it is taken from the classical regional cuisine where some dishes are served with toasted bread crumbs. Here the concept is turned over: traditional ingredients are revised and proposed in new way to eat pasta according to different schemes». The recipes of pasta that can be spread for breakfast will be two: garlic, oil and chili pepper (and mint) and carbonara (bacon, egg and cheese sauce). A speech not to be missed.
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Alfio Ghezzi and the fusion of Sardinian canederlo January 30, 3.00 pm: it’s the time of Alfio Ghezzi: newly starred, newly forty, for the first time speaker at IG. Also the canederli (dumplings made with bread) that he is going to present in the Sala Blu are new, the result of a sort of crossover between Sardinia and Trentino. In fact they are made with Sardinian fregola (durum wheat pasta), a dish that the aficionado of the Locanda Margon know well: in winter they are prepared with clams and turnip-top broth (picture); in summer with clams and tomato broth. In the Sala Blu a third version will arrive that we don’t reveal.
Instead, we can listen from the chef the genesis of the basic idea: «One day, coming back home, my wife and daughters told me, as always, ‘you cook’. I had some fregola aside, and I started cooking it as if it was a risotto. During the creaming phase I was inattentive and I left it a bit wet. So I decided to dry and thicken it with whipped dry bread and mix it with garlic and grana cheese. When my daughter told me ‘give me a mountain’, I took a coffee cup, put the fregola in it and I dished it up. There I realized that the small pieces looked like the bread that generally gives shape to the canederlo. So I decided to propose it at the restaurant in the tasting menu “bollicine”, matched to a Riserva Lunelli 2004».
A second dish will be centered on stuffed kamut snails. Here again we have a regional dish which, before coming back to Trento, makes some halts in Apulia, Campania and Piedmont.
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Durum wheat and tria: Apulia by Michele Rotondo The dish in the picture, Lasagnette with flowering courgette, is signed by Michele Rotondo of the Masseria Petrino in Palagianello, in the province of Taranto, a chef whose evolutions are well summed up by our Vincenzo Rizzi.
In his region pasta is almost always fresh, from the orecchiette eaten on Sunday to the little macaroni, that here can have imperceptibly (to strangers) different shapes such as minchiareddi, pizzarieddi or maccaruni, from sagne ‘ncannulate to tria, pappardelle having the shape of a rhomb that according to Christian tradition remind the wood shavings of Joseph, whose feast is celebrated on March 19 with big quantities of Ciciri e tria, pasta with chick-peas. From 4.00 pm Rotondo will present a special version of it, with octopus and chick-peas gnocchi instead of pappardelle; for further details just see the live performance. Early news: celiacs too can enjoy the tasting.
The second dish is significant already in its title: “Un mare di pasta all’italiana” (A sea of Italian style pasta). Glancing at the recipe we find paccheri, conchiglie, rigatoni and calamarate altogether. And various fish from the Ionian Sea that our chef seems to know like a miser knows every gorge of his pockets. Slurp.
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Fusto’s self-consciousness and pasta in the dessert  It happens that Gianluca Fusto is the author of three speeches during the three days of Identità. On Sunday, January 30 at 5.00 pm he is going to deal with a subject we have already treated in the previous numbers: pasta in the dessert. We call him to have an anticipation on the class and we find that he is in Brescia at link=http://www.castalimenti.it]Cast Alimenti[/link] to train Andrea Bergognoni and Antonio D’Aloisio, two young Italians around 20 who just won the Campionati mondiali di pasticceria juniors (Junior World Confectionery Championship) held at the Sigep in Rimini on Sunday, January 23.
So, pasta. Which is the philosophy behind his intervention Paccheri, zucca, nocciole e zafferano (Paccheri, pumpkin, hazelnut and saffron)? «First of all»Fusto explains, «I would like to show that not only fresh pasta can have an important role in the desserts, but also dry pasta, a more complex challenge from a cultural point of view because we tend to associate starch to the salty world». This being said, «I won’t talk much about taste and pasta but rather about mouth, touch and thermal sensations: what does happen, from the point of view of structure, when we eat a paccheri? Because a piece of pasta cooked in salty water has a starchy structure and when you chew it, it seems like rubber which shrinks. If you cook it in water sweetened with granulated sugar and dextrose and made acid with some lemon peel and then put it in hazelnut oil, it changes its structure and becomes fatty». And what about pumpkin? And saffron? «They will complete the dish to comply with the trio regulation, according to which there shall always be fruit, dry fruit and a spice in a dish».
Three ingredients linked to autumn, along a journey to know oneself («it is always necessary to listen to oneself and give oneself time after tasting) which is the leitmotiv of the three speeches of Fusto and, in this specific case, a homage to his colleagues Emanuele Scarello and Mattia Pariani, among the inspirers of the sweet pasta dish we are going to see.
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Davide Scabin and the oblivion of pasta as first course At the end of the day, after 6:00 pm, Davide Scabin will take the floor. The chef from Rivoli will add a third halt to the way traced for the first time in June, during Identità London 2010, when he amazed the audience with the event Pure monogram pasta (here the summary in the clip by Iwcasuisse). Second halt in November 2010 in Tarvisio, Ein Prosit: at the Edelhof hotel they still remember his Maccheroni soufflé.
«I presented so many different dishes that I will propose them again in Milan, with slight variations» he anticipates «I increasingly consider pasta as a material rather than an ingredient». Let’s get prepared, then, to a series of unconventional dishes, from Pasta Sushi to Pizza Margherita Spaghetti (in the picture, which is the manifesto of Identità Golose 2011), from Rigatoni Soufflé to Tomato and Orange Tagliatelle. «I would like to take the people of the Sala Blu by the hand and lead them to an oblivion journey: they have to forget what they have always believed about pasta. I would like that, once the class ended, they could all think with surprise: ‘well, pasta can also be a first course’».
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Felicetti and spaghetti seen by North Americans Riccardo Felicetti of the pasta-factory in Predazzo, Trentino, is in North America for a business trip. We reach him on the phone: he has just landed in San Francisco, venue of the Fancy Food Show, «an exhibition» he explains «which is held twice a year: a summer edition in New York City and this winter edition on the West Coast».
He arrives from Canada: he made a stop in Toronto and Montreal for a series of meetings and to talk with his distributor he as worked with for several years. Which is the most popular pasta over there? «We work a lot with the brand Felicetti and obviously less with the brand Monograno. As many other colleagues, we are working to spread the culture of the product that abroad is often seen in a different way than in Italy». An example? «Yesterday night I went to a restaurant in Montreal for dinner. I asked for a dish of spaghetti with clams. I was luckier than I imagined because they served me thick spaghetti challenging the ruling dogma here according to which fish needs thin spaghetti. Well cooked, rightly underdone. The problem was that the whole dish of spaghetti with clams was annihilated by a cream which destroyed the taste of both. Devastating».
The experience wasn’t better in the economy class of the Toronto-San Francisco Air Canada flight: the meal menu proposed fillet or pasta «I have chosen meat. I had seen pasta swimming in the bowl of the person sitting next to me. However I am glad that the product is often served on flights, in ‘extreme’ conditions. I’m happy that there is a steady research on pre-cooking and following re-conditioning. And I have to underline that the person next to me has finished his dish».
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Antonello Colonna and the legend of Cacio e pepe The Cacio e pepe (Pasta with sheep’s milk cheese and pepper) by Antonello Colonna, a legendary dish on whose genesis and preparation the Roman chef will give a full class on Sunday, January 30 at 12.30 pm in the Sala Blu. |
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