Dear {NOMEUTENTE}We can create all the most incredible and even unexpected dishes but there are some which are enduring and everlasting. To me, the Pasta alla Carbonara is an absolute dainty and piggish dish, a first course I’m never tired of dreaming and eating, perfect like the match Italy-Germany 4-3. And I don’t think I’m the only one, otherwise the success of that prepared by Pipero al Rex, well explained here below, would be inexplicable. Preparing a Carbonara in Rome and drawing people crazy for it is a deed of prowess, because the comparison is with something known and the risk of proposing the same old story lies always in wait.
Carbonara again? Sure, provided that it is done well. Generally speaking, tradition often deceives because very few take real care to a recipe they prepare with the iron mike, with no attention, using the left hand and just because they have to sign it (and also because they are not able to produce a shred of new idea).
Even creative chefs make mistakes of course but at least they run the risk and whet the clients, capturing their attention with something different and usually are more concentrated when preparing that certain dish. Then, obviously, it also has to be good. This newsletter celebrates the two “Rex” of Carbonara, being well aware that they can prepare many other pasta recipes.
Paolo Marchi
texts by Cecilia Todeschini and Gabriele Zanatta |
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Identità di pasta: the first six speakers The program of Identità Milano 2013, edition number 9 of a congress whose way started in January 2005 in Piazza Affari and then moved to MiCo, the congress center of via Gattamelata to find new areas and spurs, has been on the web for a few days.
The meeting with Identità di Pasta is renewed again on Sunday February 10 in the Sala Blu 2. Seven speakers, six of them already officially known while for the seventh we have to be patient still for about ten days.
The towns where the speakers works are located in Northern, Central and Southern Italy: Milan for Matteo Baronetto, Siddi in the province of Cagliari for Roberto Petza and his Casa Puddu, Rome for Anthony Genovese, Pinerolo (Turin) for Christian Milone, Rivoli (Turin) for Davide Scabin, and finally Potenza for Frank Rizzuti. Three classes in the morning and four in the afternoon.
My gluttonous dream? Ending up the day with a great spaghetti dinner and I think of a precise dish and chefs: the Carbonara by Luciano Monosilio and Alessandro Pipero. Also in view of the Roma Food&Wine Festival, from the 17 to the 19 of May at the last floor of Eataly.
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I love Japan, Japan loves pasta Now I’m in Japan for the BioFach Japan exhibition. It’s a country where I return with great pleasure also for its culture of pasta, much more developed than elsewhere. Japanese have always been familiar with extruded and laminated cereals: let’s think for instance of soba and udon. However, the knowledge of Italian pasta astonishes me every time: with a consumption of roughly 3 kilos per capita, it is the fifth nation in the world for imports of our prince food. And there is a very close relationship between us, almost a brotherhood, which is evident also thanks to pasta: I have visited a couple of pasta-factories which repeat our Italian technologies and are very well cared for.
I have an anecdote which tells a lot about it: during an exhibition I deliver a package of our bronze died spaghetti to the technical manager of a pasta-factory in Tokyo. He looks at it and unhesitatingly as a typical pasta-maker, takes one spaghetti out of it and turns it over in his fingers, between thumb and forefinger. «Mister Felicetti», he says, «this drawing machine is ovalized: talk about it with your supplier». Ovalized means that it is not 100% round, with a non homogeneous diameter, a feature very difficult to check with a caliper imagine to the naked eye. When I came back home I discovered he was right.
For these reasons I light up every time I go to this country, for the precision of the detail, evident even in cookings which here are always perfect. The research and will to imitate Italian standards are great as well as the making-up of raw materials, always of very high level, even from the point of view of packaging. If pasta is a crossover food, able to pull down all frontiers here in Japan it is clear more than in every other place in the world.
Riccardo Felicetti, Felicetti pasta-factory
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The (light) Pasta ai 4 formaggi by Milone  The Pasta ai 4 formaggi (pasta with four cheeses) is a dish of the Italian tradition, one among the most popular in the menus of Italian eating houses (especially once) and certainly among the first experiments of us all in our teens. Enjoyable and satisfying even though often extremely heavy.
The version presented last week at Ein Prosit by Christian Milone, chef of the Gastronavicella, two gourmet tables in the Trattoria Zappatori in Pinerolo (Turin, +39.0121.374158) keeps the memory while avoiding feeling full. Seirass (a fresh cow ricotta cheese), Grana Padano, blue Cozie (toma cheese with herbs called tuma blova in the dialect) and whey are treated like tea leaves, vacuum cooked in infusion with water.
The following step consists in filtering the cheese since what interests the young chef is the taste of the liquid obtained from it. Tastiness is balanced by the tapioca which is added in powder, used to thicken this broth until obtaining a honey consistency. The rigatoni just drained is added together with a knob of butter. To finish the dish, Sichuan pepper and a grating of the same blue Cozie toma cheese. In his Gastronavicella Milone steals the beauty from the past to project it in the present. Next landing: the day at Identità di Pasta in Milan.
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Pipero, Monosilio and 5 rules for a carbonara Coming from Albano Laziale, today Alessandro Pipero works comfortably in Rome, at the hotel Rex and from here he draws great attention on the B side of the kitchen (that after all is the A side, the more exposed): the hall. A bet won thanks to a unique alliance between Alessandro Pipero and the chef Luciano Monosilio, who has just obtained one Michelin star.
In Tarvisio, on the occasion of Ein Prosit, they have given a very crowded class on the Roman symbol dish, the carbonara, that right in these days has drawn also the attention of the New York Times. The basic idea of them: selling the dish by weight to promote the restaurant. “Farewell adored carbonara” is the following step, a slogan to remove what has made them famous from the menu (remove in theory not to remain slaves of it). In a restaurant, it is important not only the kitchen but also the ability to restore the balance between chef and maître. This year Identità di Sala (on Sunday February 10, 2013, Sala blu) will be the occasion to take stock of the situation.
According to Monosilio «The recipe of the carbonara is learned from childhood and needs no doses because it comes by itself and the taste shall not have secret ingredients». Only a few absolutely necessary rules: 1. long or short pasta but rightly cooked: the time needed is written on the package, nothing more and nothing less 2. Egg yolks whipped with pepper, ewe’s milk cheese and grana cheese without warming them 3. slowly cooked streaky bacon to have it remain crunchy (grease is separated but don’t throw it away!) 4. grease added after the pasta (it gives a bitter shade which balances the dish), 5. always a grating of pepper and ewe’s milk cheese. The best dose? Maître and chef say 250 grams.
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RECIPE/ The Tortelli with cheese and snails by Cogo The Tortelli with cheese and snails by Lorenzo Cogo from the restaurant El Coq in Marano Vicentino (Vicenza), who has been awarded one Michelin star one and a half year after opening and is among the speakers at Identità Milano on February 10, 2013. The following recipe is for 30 persons. To be prepared for groups, maybe on the occasion of a picnic in an Alpine hut like those organized every now and then by the young chef.
INGREDIENTS
500 g Gran Pasta “00” flour
9 egg yolks
2 eggs
for the cheese stuffing
500 g Sola cheese with mountain herbs
250 g milk
33 g flour
25 g butter
salt
for the whipped goat’s butter
250 g goat’s butter
250 g water
2 g salt
10 g potato starch
other
60 snails
60 chopped pumpkin seeds
60 clover leaves
60 parsley stems
extra-virgin olive oil as needed
vegetable broth as needed
100 g pumpkin seed oil
PROCEDURE
Knead all the ingredients until obtaining a smooth dough, vacuum keep and let it rest for 2 hours in the fridge. Put all the ingredients into the bimby at 90°C for 25 minutes. Curdle in the fridge for 1 night.
The day after prepare small balls of 6 g each. Roll out the dough thinly, stuff it with the cheese and give it the shape of tortelli. Bring butter, water and salt to boil, add the potato starch melted in little water, mix well and whisk with the immersion blender. Let it rest in the fridge.
Cook the tortelli in salty water for 5 minutes. Separately flavor a bit of oil with a garlic clove on low heat, remove the garlic and brown the nails on high heat for a few minutes. Add salt and then the whipped butter and the vegetable broth. Whip the tortelli with the prepared base.
Pour ½ spoon of pumpkin seed oil in the middle of a warm dish; place 5 tortelli on each dish, cover with small quantities of butter, snails and place the pumpkin seeds and the herbs on top. Serve.
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The Paccheri with chlorophyll by Matteo Torretta Paccheri with parsley chlorophyll and oysters by Matteo Torretta, chef at the Al V Piano, “attico gourmet” of the Grand Visconti Palace in Milan, via Isonzo 14. (there is also an independent entrance from via Mantova). The paccheri («which can be replaced also by rigatoni or macaroni» the chef explains) are cooked directly into a parsley chlorophyll centrifuged at 48°C with ginger (30 grams for 2 liters of water). Cooking lasts 10 minutes instead of the regular 12: «because it has to be a little crunchy». Finally, raw oysters are added. The matching was made with an Etna White wine 2010 by Benanti «which favors salivation», the new maître Alberto Tasinato, who has spent 4 years at the Trussardi alla Scala, explains, «necessary to dampen the paccheri in the mouth».
This dish was probably the most essential in the tasting menu of the restaurant, featuring creative whirls spurred to add rather than take away, a roundabout which reached another delicious peak with the other first course, Rice and wood: rice dampened with Oban whisky, diced foie gras and crunchy roots, a bitterness that the maître Tasinato came to clean with the sweetness of the Moscato Anarchia Costituzionale 2010 by Walter Massa. Another evidence of an interesting dialogue between kitchen and dining room. |
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Marianna Vitale: memories of the South If the dish in the picture reminds you of a vinyl disk, you have seen well: it is the Felicetti cuttlefish ink spaghetti (the same which has enchanted Gualtiero Marchesi) that Marianna Vitale from Sud restaurant in Quarto (Naples) has prepared for the Milanese event Mangiadischi, zero edition of a format which intends to be a crossover of gastronomy and music.
«We wanted to play», the author explains, «on the pasta omelet from Naples and the subject Un Disco per l’estate (A record for summer). This spaghetti is cooked in water, sautéed with garlic, oil and chili pepper and cooked again with mozzarella cheese water. Without eggs, we have half-cooked it on both sides, a and b». The vinyl disk which was really going on was Nostalgia istantanea by Dargen D’Amico. The dish was an alternation of memories, present even if absent: mozzarella water disappeared with the cooking, mozzarella cheese dried and grated, oil disappeared in the emulsion». Reminiscences of the South. |
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At La Peca, the crème brûlée fills the tortelli The delicious Crème brûlée tortelli by the brothers Nicola and Pierluigi Portinari from La Peca in Lonigo (Vicenza), speakers at Identità Naturali within the Milanese congress on Monday February 11. How to interpret fresh pasta at the end of the menu? Trying to balance covering and stuffing so that none dominates the other.
In this specific case - Pierluigi, maître and pastry-chef, explains - «we have prepared traditional fresh pasta adding some sugar and decreasing the quantity of flour to increase elasticity. The stuffing is a crème brûlée made with concentrated milk instead of cream ». On the bottom «a soup of citrus with a touch of ginger vacuum pickled before for 3 hours» to complete. Enough to have another helping.
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Milan: the egg Sfogliatella with yellow surprise To confirm that what counts is the substance and not the means, yesterday night facebook gave me a very beautiful emotion, hoping that in December it turns out to be also good. Marco Ambrosino, born in 1984, a chef from Naples who settled in Milan, has tagged in my facebook profile the picture of a dish that he has called Napoli-Milano andata e ritorno (Naples- Milan round trip) and which will be on the menu from Tuesday, December 4. It is a fake sfogliatella, a bundle of egg pasta stuffed with saffron risotto. There is also a version with pumpkin and macaroons.
Combining two classical ingredients in well different fields, such as tagliatelle and yellow risotto reminds me of one of the first dishes by Carlo Cracco when he was “simply” the chef at the Cracco-Peck; the Marrow-bone breaded cutlet with the marrow-bone well in the middle of the dish and the bread-crumbs all around the white small cylinder with the inevitable marrow in sight.
Marco is the chef of the restaurant Buongusto via Caminadella 2, telephone number +39.02.86452479, (re)opened by Enrica Besana in 2003, forty years after its opening as pasta-factory. Well done. (pm) |
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