Dear {NOMEUTENTE}
For the third consecutive time Identità Golose Milano has devoted a full day to pasta, the most Italian of all delicacies, together with pizza. With a great difference: pasta is also a very good home-made food while pizza is not because, even if we do our best, home ovens never reach the ideal temperatures to perfectly cook margherita pizzas and other tasty pizzas (which by the way explains why there are so many pizzerias and no spaghetti houses). Then it is foreseeable that speakers at Identità di Pasta go beyond the limits of us humans and it is right, the contrary would be sensational.
Third year talking about pasta and we are far from completing the subject, which is almost endless so that we are already thinking ahead to 2013 with two ideas, one more gluttonous and the other more rational.
Paolo Marchi
Texts by Carlo Passera (CP) and Federico De Cesare Viola (FDCV). Pictures by Francesca Brambilla and Serena Serrani. Co-ordination by Gabriele Zanatta. Special thanks to Riccardo Felicetti and Eleonora Cozzella of Espresso Wine & Food, for emceeing the whole Identità di Pasta day.
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Aprea: «This pasta is a turnip!» The third edition of Identità di Pasta in Milan was opened by the speech of Riccardo Felicetti of Monograno Felicetti, vice president of Aidepi - Associazione delle industrie del dolce e della pasta italiane. Who better than him to explain that “This day shall be a spur to talk increasingly more about pasta, a product considered banal for too much time. It is crucial for pasta to come back being what it is, a means for Italian cuisine to aspire to the markets of the whole world”.
The first ace of the carbohydrate marathon to come on the stage is Andrea Aprea of the Vun at the Park Hyatt in Milan. A Neapolitan who has been wandering around the world for 14 years, used to any kind of change and culture, he has opened the day overcoming all our certainties in a perfect play of camouflage. The popular Italian dough disguises itself as a vegetable and vice versa in two “masked dishes” that is Linguine cooked in the red cabbage extract with burrata, smoked herring, pine seeds and watercress shoots and Turnip dough sheet cannellone with buffalo ricotta, catalogna chicory, scampi and their consommé (in the picture). Absolute protagonists: obviously pasta and turnips.
The linguine, boiled in salty water just for two minutes (somebody would remember a specific lesson on the matter by Elio Sironi at Identità Milano 2010…) ends its cooking dipped in a red cabbage extract, which gives it taste and colour: «In this way, we obtain a product which keeps the consistency of pasta while having a vegetable taste» Aprea explains. Plating up foresees a base of burrata sauce with extra-virgin olive oil, smoky notes of smoked herring, iodic notes of its caviar, pungent notes of watercress and the nut crunchiness of toasted pine seeds. «You are a wizard at pasta, you have always been studying it» was the comment of Eleonora Cozzella, M.C. of the whole day, while the chef was presenting his second dish: before the linguine disguised by turnip while now a thin turnip dough sheet becomes a cannolo stuffed with buffalo ricotta and catalogna chicory, overlapped by a prawn just scalded on its back, catalogna chicory tips, white radish extract emulsion, turnip shoots and the prawn consommé to end up.
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Di Costanzo, the Pollock of pasta and potatoes Pasta and potatoes, yesterday and today. This was the subject treated by Nino Di Costanzo of the Il Mosaico at the Terme Manzi Hotel in Ischia. A monument dish of tradition in which the chef uses only ingredients from the territory of the region Campania. A lesson he has learnt from his mothers: “When I was a child, I remember my mum and grandma wandering around the whole island to gather the ingredients for one dish: herbs from the farmer, vegetables from a different garden, fish from a reliable fisherman. Today, this attention to the product is crucial for my cooking”.
There are two versions, a classical one and another one which respects the taste of the dish while changing its shapes and architectures. While the audience in the hall licked their lips with a reassuring hot and rigorously glutton version, Di Costanzo was creating a possible variation for the cameras, making a Pollock-style palette with 25 different shapes of pasta cooked at the same time. It isn’t easy; you have to organize a schedule of cooking using a timer: every time it rings, a shape of pasta is put into the boiling water, in order of cooking time from the 23 minutes for the fusillone to the 5 minutes for the thin spaghetti. However, it is also good remembering the old say “pasta suffers from loneliness”. In other words, it shall never be left alone but always taste it and don’t rely on the indicated cooking times, mainly in case of artisan bronze drawn pasta, since cooking times can vary according to the lot and the wear of the die.
Four different varieties of potatoes are used to obtain a unique “mosaic” of colors and consistencies: the violet potato is centrifuged, a soup is made with the red potato, chips are prepared with the white and yellow ones and a mousse is got from the yellow potato, siphoned with buffalo milk.
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Sposito and the update to tradition He comes from far away and will go far. The chef Francesco Sposito, born in 1983, with a rapidly growing career featuring two solid foundations in the past called Alain Passard and mainly Igles Corelli (his real master, mentioned and immediately appeared in the hall: this year really everybody attended Identità Milano...) moves his birth date by updating two extremely traditional dishes such as Pasta and beans (picture at the bottom of this newsletter) and Pasta with peas (picture beside). Obviously, in a 2012 version. «We take the best from the past and bring it to the future. Without ever distorting its rituals» he explains to an audience well disposed to be led to this travel through time, on the edge of taste and, why not, of culture (and not only popular).
So pasta is boiled in a light fish broth which however keeps a touch of the past, the fattiness of pork rinds, a real souvenir of childhood – oh, grandma cooking! – which brings tears in the eyes of the most nostalgic ones; then beans are poured (borlotti or, in this case, also fresh cannellini are suitable) and whipping with Grana Padano cheese starts already at half cooking «because adding it at the end would make the cheese taste too pushing». The sea smell, already present in the broth, is amplified by a strong sauce made using only the valves of female mussels (ten kilos of mussels, 400 grams of sauce!) and by the aristocratic final touch: overlapping quenelle of shrimp tartare.
As for the pasta with peas, it is soon changed into pea pasta: in fact, tagliatelle is obtained with 35% of dehydrated legume flour mixed with classical bran and soft wheat flour; the recipe proposed on this occasion also foresees a comfit shallot (cooked in oil for three hours), grana cheese and a brittle of dehydrated Pietraroja ham. Land, hence, even though a seasonal sea variation foresees the tastiness of anglerfish. De gustibus.
CP
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Davide Scabin, a warrior armed with a fusillo “Why there isn’t even one pasta dish in your tasting menu?” “Because pasta is banal” The client, however satisfied with his great dinner, thanks and goes away. What Davide Scabin didn’t know is that the one who asked him that question was the mentor of Monograno Felicetti, pasta-factory in Predazzo, in the region Trentino. This was the first meeting between the chef of the Combal.zero in Rivoli and Riccardo Felicetti. Who, 6 months later, decides to come back to the restaurant for dinner, but this time with a package of pasta and a request/challenge to the chef: “to make pasta not banal”. The challenge was taken up with a tormented, curious, and creative approach, following his culinary DNA. The same of a designer facing a material: always looking for new shapes and uses.
So on the stage of Identità di Pasta Scabin has first presented two “chef” creations and then a “dissociated” and provoking use of pasta. We start with the Baked big onion stuffed with spaghetti and vegetables (picture): a simple but amazing dish, after all from Piedmont, that the chef has chosen also to introduce the technique of infusion cooking, crucial to respect the thicker shapes of pasta that easily break in boiling water and that have to be rehydrated instead. We go on with the rigatone – boiled, toasted in the pan and stuffed with carbonara – which isn’t a first course but perfectly accompanies a seafood salad.
We end up with the last provocation by Scabin: the 3 Pasta Warriors (served at the Felicetti booth during the whole Identità Milano), a guerrilla marketing aggressive name to fight on the same battlefield of fast food but winking at street food (“we have to be hard to talk about pre-cooked pasta and fast food but after all what is more fast than Italian pasta to create a gastronomic masterpiece?”). The wrap fusillone is a piadina (flat unleavened bread) stuffed with pasta. The TWA spaghetti is served as in the economy class of an intercontinental flight: pasta shaped as a pill and vegetables dehydrated for 72 hours in a polystyrene thermal glass, all enlivened by a made in Italy veal broth. Finally, there is the “squeeze penna”, to be dressed directly using a top down of carbonara, amatriciana or pesto. Another suggestion about pre-cooking: drain pasta with olive oil in order to create a greasy film and stop the rehydration of the infusion. The same principle of our grandparents in the mountains who, before the invention of Gore-Tex, used to spread grease on their boots to prevent water from entering.
FDCV
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Pino Cuttaia’s quiet revolution “Think of milk: from the same kind hundreds of different cheeses can be produced. Or of tomato: from the same bunch each of us will prepare a different sauce. This is the gesture, the wealth of our cuisine. Differently from other cuisines, Italian taste isn’t standardized”. The interpretation of pasta by Pino Cuttaia is a heartbroken hymn to the importance of memory in cooking and the safeguard of the great Italian artisanship. “We have to talk less, get our jacket dirty and stay more in front of the fire. Creativity is also doing the shopping, because I’m not an artist or an architect but an artisan and I need my memories and my tools”.
The chef from Licata chooses a dish which tells his summer seasons in Milazzo with the “eggplant double dishes” and keeps as in a Madia all the gestures, tools and ingredients of his Sicilian-Italian grammar: Eggplant cannolo in crunchy pasta (picture). The wafer of the cannolo is made with an eggplant disk with oven paper inside not to have it stick while frying. Then it is stuffed with an eggplant sauce (made with cow’s ricotta and fried chopped onions) and is “sealed” with a Perlina eggplant cut in half. All around a ball of crunchy capellini (first cooked for very few minutes with saffron pistils and then baked), a tomato sauce (the tomato is cooked with its skin to keep a lively color) and a sprinkling of Ragusano cheese. There is a crunchy side “for those bothering gourmets”, the textura, the fat side, the sourness of the tomato, the sweet side and the bitter side of the eggplant.
A poor and apparently simple dish, able to tell the Italian taste and that gathers so many gestures and great know-how. A black and white cuisine. “I remember more a film from Fellini than Avatar. In the kitchen too, as at the movie, there are memories so powerful that they don’t need sophistication or special effects. Gestures and perfumes remain for life, you may forget the face of a person but tasting memory remains with you for good”.
FDCV
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Alessandro Gilmozzi: height sweet symphonies Alessandro Gilmozzi has closed the great day completely devoted to pasta while the final celebrations for this really extraordinary edition of Identità Milano 2012 were already starting. He was “away from home” in a double sense: from his El Molin in Cavalese, in the Fiemme Valley, to the regional capital of Lombardy and from the herbs he adores, and goes picking up at dawn which earns him the name of elf chef (he has catalogued 330 different herbs, including lichens and sweet and bitter roots) to the “Sweet sensations of pasta”, that is the title of his lesson.
So let’s make room for desserts, as it is proper to end every talk about cooking, which are interpreted by the chef using an unusual ingredient as main element that is emmer pasta. That can become a sweet-creamy fondant (pasta is cooked and candied with honeydew from spruce and then passed through the pacojet) and be the base for a butter and cardamom kamut tagliatella ice cream (so a “double pasta” dessert: emmer pasta and this tagliatella that is first cooked and then whipped). Gilmozzi also wants a crunchy part and, to follow local tradition, he prepares a tisane with wild chamomile and calendula, thickens it with maize starch and has it dry in order to obtain something like a puff-pastry sheet to garnish the already plated up dessert.
Second proposal, the macaron (in the picture, on the left) always made with emmer pasta; when reduced into flour it replaces the almond flour after being cooked as above, slightly candied with the honeydew and then dried. The stuffing is made of apples from the Val di Non (put into nitrogen and then whirled in a centrifuge) and pumpkin cream (in syrup with honey). The macaron is served accompanied by pumpkin seed custard cream.
CP
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Felicetti/Scabin, the revolution goes on Spaghetto, fusillo, conchiglia and penna. A job on big shapes which sees on the two sides of the creative table Riccardo Felicetti of Pastai Felicetti and Davide Scabin. A pair that has worked under extreme conditions on the concepts of thickness, consistency, taste and yield. Concepts which are easier to say than to realize and which gave origin to concept dishes such as the Wrap Fusillone (picture), the TWA Spaghettone or the Squeeze Penna, assault troops in the Pasta Warriors army headed by sergeant Scabin.
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Pasta and beans by Francesco Sposito The Pasta and beans by Francesco Sposito, young chef at the Taverna Estia in Brusciano (Naples). Dish shown at Identità Milano 2012. Picture Brambilla/Serrani
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Spaghetti with spring onion, homage to Aimo The presence of pasta at Identità Milano 2012 went beyond last Tuesday, February 7. For instance, when it was decided to pay homage to the Italian genius of Aimo Moroni and his life-long love Nadia, Massimiliano Alajmo and Corrado Assenza didn’t hesitate to accept our invitation, each one interpreting his version of the Spaghetti with spring onion and chilli pepper while the chefs of the Luogo di Aimo e Nadia, Fabio Pisani and Alessandro Negrini have proposed the classical version which is almost half a century old. The Moronis, born in Tuscany but adopted by Lombardy, started proposing this dish to contrast the spreading of ordinary Spaghetti with garlic, oil and chilli pepper which theoretically is the perfect spaghetti dish for every emergency but actually is an ill-treatment of three elements of poor nobility if garlic is burnt, oil is bad and scalding and chilli pepper is dry and violent. Not to mention the quality of pasta.
pm
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