Dear {NOMEUTENTE}
an underdone hall the Sala Blu where last Sunday the second edition of Identità di Pasta came back after its debut last year, when we talked a lot about cooking, how to reach the underdone time to drain, amalgamate and add the sauce to the pasta. Woe betide anyone who overcooks spaghetti, macaroni and bucatini even if the more we go Northwards the more we leave that touch of underdone so much appreciated in Naples and even more Southwards.
This year room is made to sauces, sweet with Gianluca Fusto or with lentisk resin with Carlo Cracco, as well as to unusual shapes with Ghezzi and his canederli far from the tradition of Trentino.
Tradition can warm up our heart, deeply touch us and make us dream but the world goes on and a dish is never the same of the one we have tasted the last time. We would be bored stiff. This is why next year the program will be different again.
Paolo Marchi
texts by Samuele Amadori, pictures by Alessandro Castiglioni
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The Cavalieri (Knights) and pasta for the Unity of Italy Identità di Pasta took place at the opening of the congress on Sunday, January 30 but when on Tuesday February 1st the Cavalieri della Cucina Italiana (The Knights of Italian Cuisine) wanted to celebrate 150 years from the Unification of Italy with a dish that unites and doesn’t divide pasta or better spaghetti was chosen, cooked in the same pot and then flavored according to personal inspiration directly by the chef or by one of his collaborators for those absent (Beck, Bottura, Niederkofler, Sultano and Uliassi).
During cooking, homage was done to Corrado Assenza because the dessert time is the other crucial time in the life of a restaurant, which shall be sweet and salty with its own balance and personality. And to Aimo Moroni too, king of Italian tastes, very much celebrated for his Spaghetti cipollotto e peperoncino (Spaghetti with spring onion and chili pepper) always tasty and delicious.
This is how things turned out: when the pasta was almost ready, each one did his part, placing a small copper pot on an eighty-year old log. Fifteen cooks (because, even if it may seem strange, today the Cavalieri are starred chefs but they have started as cooks, know the smell of work, what stress is as well as the famous bitter pill they often had to swallow. Unfortunately for average cooks, they think, cook and create better than almost all the others) for sixteen small pots because the sixteenth is left free for any other cook willing to complete the Unity of Italy dish.
To Davide Scabin spaghetti is “Cavour-style” with onion, pepper and anchovy; Gennaro Esposito prepares it with limpets and spugnilli (hanged up small tomatoes); Massimiliano Alajmo cooks it with vacuum corn-meal mush crumbs and Parmesan cheese with water; Moreno Cedroni eats it prepared “porchetta style” with murexes; Giancarlo Perbellini prefers it with garlic and oil, rampions and schie (common shrimps from the lagoon) salad; Andrea Berton calls it “Milano”, with oil, broth and saffron; Antonino Cannavacciuolo involves also Eugenio Pol using the Fobello bread sauce and tomato; Chicco Cerea cooks it with broccolis, almost raw prawns and candied pachino tomato, like a tricolor. Giovanni Santini prepares spaghetti with mint, foils of crunchy heel and spring onion, an homage to spring onion is that of Aimo Moroni; Niko Romito with dried cod, oil and thyme; Norbert Niederkofler with sweetbread balls and puccia ladina (a typical bread from the Alta Badia); Ciccio Sultano thinks of it as “My fist walk as Sicilian-Italian” with mullet roe, lime, lemon peel and water; Massimo Bottura works it with fifth quarter (offal) of Bianca Modenese stuffing and vacuum marrow, and finally Mauro Uliassi cooks it smoked with clams and roasted small tomatoes and Heinz Beck gets inspiration from the Roman tradition using sheep’s milk cheese and pepper with lime shrimps. Carlo Cracco will be called on the stage by his colleagues to symbolically add his sauce to the last spaghetti on behalf of all the others (with rampions and anchovies). In the glasses Ferrari sparkling wine by Camilla Lunelli.
pmar
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Three days of pasta, passionately pasta IG 2011 will be remembered as the three “P” edition: Pasta, Pizza and Pastry-making, with the first one being a success during the first day with Identità di Pasta in the Sala Blu (and not only) for the second consecutive year. A regular date for the congress according to Riccardo Felicetti of the Pastificio Felicetti in Predazzo, first supporter of the event: «I’m really satisfied with what we have related and seen during the three days in Milan. To chefs pasta is becoming a great incentive to interact with us producers. And to us a basic spur to steadily improve our products».
Evidence is given by the speeches during the whole day of Identità di Pasta that we relate here below. And also by the steady resounding with the word “pasta” even outside the Sala Blu: if we read the chronicle of the three days (here, here and here) we see the “Pasta non pasta” by Pier Bussetti, the “risotto style” pasta by Davide Oldani and his team, the Pasta Soufflé by Beppe Rambaldi... Not to forget the large crowd gathered every day at the Felicetti booth for lunch time and happy hour, a triumph of Seafood Conchiglioni Matt, Carbonara style Khorasan Kamut Wheat Spaghetti and Penne Ritorte Matt with broccolis signed by a Davide Scabin in great form.
GZ |
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Elio Sironi: early bird catches the worm Pasta in the morning? Why not. Elio Sironi chef of the Bulgari in Milan, first protagonist of the Identità di pasta day has interpreted the most important among the elements of the Mediterranean tradition as a spread for breakfast. Why? “Because it is rich in carbohydrates which are like a full tank for the first meal of the day. So let’s give a free hand to pasta to spread, prepared with the most typical recipes devoted to this dish”.
Garlic, oil and chili pepper, as if it was white coffee, or alla norma (with eggplant and salty ricotta). On toasted bread, and here we can do as we like. Whole meal pasta, without salt, in spoonfuls. It is used to amalgamate the other ingredients, to give a soul to the little bruschetta.
And there is also the carbonara (bacon, egg and cheese sauce). Extremely crunchy bacon crumbs with a spread made of an onion with a laurel leaf and cream to bind the false rice, as Sironi has called it. This pasta in a version similar to a salty Nutella has been the central element, a pep pill to start with. It is worth saying that early bird catches the worm.
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Cracco and Baronetto: scent of resin In the path devoted to pasta Carlo Cracco and [link=https://www.identitagolose.it/english/relatore.php?id=380]Matteo Baronetto have presented, in great harmony, more than Simon & Garfunkel, a daring dish using raw materials that call innovative is an understatement. Mastic is a resin obtained from the lentisk, a plant diffused in all the Mediterranean area but giving this very bitter and balsamic product, also used to treat slight disorders, only in the island of Chios, between Greece and Turkey. It can be found around like chewing-gum, but its tastiness has aroused interest in the two chefs of the restaurant located in via Victor Hugo in Milan. The chef from Vicenza explains that sweet is needed to diminish the tasty peaks of mastic. Or grease. To prepare Felicetti penne with mastic and glasswort or with black trumpet mushrooms (or seasonal raw pore mushrooms) cream or other greasy elements are needed.
Maybe the dessert is even more interesting, made with whipped cream, sugar, mastic and fish glue. To create a soft and tasty mousse. On top of it, an infusion of water with laurel and thickener shall not be missed. To end up, slices of vacuum green apples with sparkling water. Thanks to this preparation the apple remains raw but transparent. A bit of salt and the strange dish, a trip in the underbrush, is ready and signed.
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Colonna is like sheep’s milk cheese on macaroni Who could approach the most classical among classical dishes, that is pasta with sheep’s milk cheese and pepper, with sense and meaning better than the living monument of Roman, and modern Roman, cuisine? Antonello Colonna chooses long pasta, spaghettoni or bucatini broken into three. The history of this recipe dates back to a long time ago when the innkeepers used to serve it to have their customers become thirsty and sell them some more jugs of wine.
The cooking water is used to slowly whip the pasta. There is no need for oil or butter. This is enough to obtain the right consistency. Then simplicity wins. Seasoned Roman sheep’s milk cheese, right to go stringy. The risk is to use a too seasoned cheese and loose its capacity to mix to the pasta. Pasta, to Colonna is not essential. Essential is the quantity of pepper which shall be abundant and not in powder, as well as the identity of cheese. A final boutade. Colonna brought on the stage Chinese lanterns, dumplings stuffed with sheep’s milk cheese and pepper. So, he explained, the Chinese who copy everything will be happy. Let’s hope they don’t market them.
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Alfio Ghezzi and the originality of rediscovery The canederlo arrives to Trentino in the sixteenth century, thanks to the influence coming from Bohemia and Germany. Spices and plums: sweet in the dishes becomes part of food habits. More than half a millennium later Alfio Ghezzi thinks of moving the first course of the Trentine tradition to other regions and with other consistencies. The chef from the Locanda Margon in Trento amazes for his extraordinary competence: he explains every passage as if it was science and not art.
His canederlo is made with Sardinian fregola (durum wheat pasta), which is whipped with bread (if Apulian taralli are not available...) and aged Grana cheese. In this way the canederlo gets a new and amusing texture. Many small balls rolling on our palate. The broccoli from Santa Massenza is cooked in a traditional manner, seasoned with vinegar and blonde caramel. The aromatic element is given by the liver reduced with wine together with the shallot. Almost a pâté. “However, the chef explained, “often originality has to do with rediscovery”.
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Michele Rotondo, an (Apulian) sea of ideas Michele Rotondo, the Apulian chef who loves pasta as much as fish, has prepared a dish of cold pasta with all the fish available from the Tyrrhenian sea – shrimps, octopus, sea-urchins and clams and the shapes of durum wheat pasta he loves more: paccheri, conchiglie, calamarate and macaroni. A mix of pasta, a mix of fish. Paccheri stuffed with cuttlefish, a sauce obtained with the heads of red shrimps, oil, lemon peels and herbs. The calamarata with raw sea-urchins, artichoke and celery salad, seeds of pasta in the sauce with clams to obtain a raw brodetto. The whole is a tasty mixture, rich in flavors that lead us far away, in the middle of waves and the scent of iodine.
The second dish is a gnocco obtained from chick-pea and octopus in the classical chick-pea soup. Octopus and chick-peas are cooked and then the octopus is whisked with a small part of the legumes. From this dough gnocchi are obtained which are fried with some chick-peas and a tentacle of the octopus and served with a chick-pea soup.
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Gianluca Fusto and sweet pasta as a cultural challenge Devil of a Gianluca Fusto (in the picture with Eleonora Cozzella and Laura Franchini, M.C.s of the whole day in the Sala Bianca): you leave him in the morning explaining the “scientific sweet” in the Sala Bianca and you find him again in the afternoon talking about “Dessert Pasta” in the Sala Blu... The cultural approach is the same: analyzing the dish even from a chemical-physical point of view, to understand its intimate nature and its possible developments because Fusto is passion and technique, gluttony and analysis together.
Throw in the pasta, then! Pasta which undergoes a cooking process similar to the classical one ( and we are talking about dry pasta, not fresh one: the latter can be “worked” much better) but with a not negligible difference: “A pacchero cooked in salty water gets a starchy structure whereas if you cook it (as in this case) in water sweetened with granulated sugar and dextrose – made acid with lemon peel – and then put it in hazelnut oil, it gets a different structure and it won’t taste of starch any more but of hazelnut». Something –in this case pasta- to sink the pastry-chef Fusto’s teeth into (but also his hands and mind), who in this case is going to match the “mutant pacchero” to pumpkin (cut into big pieces and cooked in liquid butter) and saffron according to the rule stating that a virtually complete dish shall contain fruit, dried fruit and a spice, in a sort of profane trinity of taste. Dedicated to Corrado Assenza, Emanuele Scarello and Mattia Pariani.
Carlo Passera
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The record of pasta and its recordman Davide Scabin is happy to have excellent products available to prepare a first course that can, at the same time, give pleasure to the palate and give again its front-row place to pasta. Pasta which, if of good quality, has little need for sauces and adulterations. A pasta-philosophy launched by the chef from Piedmont 8 months ago during Identità London and who now writes a new appendix to it with his infusion pasta.
5-6 different shapes of Felicetti pasta are put into boiling water and then let to infuse in hot water. There is little need for other ingredients: a bit of oil, sheep’s milk cheese and seasoning as if it was a pasta alla carbonara. Or again with mussels, white wine and capers. Afterwards: conchiglioni to be matched to fake sushi rice made with emmer ditalini, a risottata: it is prepared as if it was sushi rice but without using rice vinegar which here is replaced by the rosemary vinegar. The conchiglioni wrap cuttlefish and coriander seeds, wasabi salmon and sea-urchin. If we have high quality pasta, the trick is just in the balance among pasta-water-salt-butter. And if quantities are respected, enjoy your pasta.
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The Pasta Seafood by Davide Scabin
Monograno Felicetti Matt Conchiglioni with cuttlefish and coriander seeds, salmon, chive and wasabi; sea-urchins from the Cantabric Sea, parsley and garlic with lemongrass oysters and chili pepper. Dish by Davide Scabin from the Combal.Zero in Rivoli.
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