Dear {NOMEUTENTE}Dear User
A couple of Sundays ago, on June 22nd to be precise, Pietro Leemann, chef-patron at restaurant Joia in Milan, specialised in natural cuisine, organised the first edition of The vegetarian chance, a meeting that went far beyond vegetarianism because in fact the competitors were asked to think of two dishes, a starter and a main course, both of which had to be vegan (without them being necessarily vegan themselves).
Daniela Cicioni won with vegan and pure raw recipes that were also perfects for celiacs. Here, however, I don’t want to mention the winners but to highlight another aspect. Vegan cuisine doesn’t just mean excluding any animal ingredient. Were this to be the case, spaghetti with tomato and basil would be enough.
The world of pasta is a prairie also for those who avoid butter, eggs and dairy products, a territory ready to be explored with increasing preparation and intelligence because once the cook removes something, he needs to put something else. The objective is a craveable vegan cuisine. It would be perfect if omnivorous people would decide to choose a vegan dish because it is truly and fully delicious, without paying attention to labels. And pasta could be the Trojan horse to overcome any diffidence.
Paolo Marchi
text by Gabriele Zanatta |
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Felicetti in New York: Sofi Awards and Swiss Air I’m writing from New York because, among other things, two of our products were nominated in as many categories at the Sofi Awards, a sort of food and beverage Oscar organised every year, since 1972, by the Specialty food association.
The evening was not very generous in terms of satisfaction: Spaghettoni Monograno and Rigatoni Khorasan Kamut Monograno, the two pastas nominated among some 2,700 other products, did not win the final prize. Still, we have the great satisfaction of having represented the only case of a non-US company with two nominees. For this reason, even though we did not get the statuette, I’m not that disappointed.
The feeling I had after observing the winning products was that a traditional item has few chances of winning when competing with new and “trendy” products. However, I strengthened my certainty, built over the last years of experience: the xy organic cucumber flavoured drink will soon disappear from the shelves, while pasta will remain there forever.
Next year we will try again, perhaps with the main ingredient you find in the dish portrayed in this photo: spaghetti with squid ink in this Salmon steak with lemon aromatised pepper, curry foam, leek and tomato cubes. Swiss Air will serve this to business class passengers throughout the summer. A small satisfaction.
Riccardo Felicetti
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Cannavacciuolo: had the French invented pasta... The nice thing about Tonino Cannavacciuolo is that in his cerebral hemispheres there are no recipes carved in the granite of eternity. The shadow in the photo of Paccheri with Genoan ragù, here beside, does not pay justice to the global colour of the dish, which is not the dark, almost menacing one of the classic Neapolitan dish (hard to find anything more traditional). It has much lighter tones, we can guarantee, «because there’s less onion», the chef from Villa Crespi reveals as he hands the dish, «don’t you think it’s tastier this way?». In fact, it is so good one would like to lick the dish itself, surmounted by a mysterious raw prawn that makes you want to faint with pleasure.
This is the last of the great dishes made with dried pasta with which the chef breached in Piedmont, since 1999, at a time when the bullying of plin and ravioli would dishearten any intrusion: «When I began to include dried pasta in the menu», the big chef recalls, «everyone would frown, including my dining room manager at the time: ‘focusing on paccheri and spaghetti is nonsense’, he said. I didn’t care. Today every restaurant bets on durum wheat». These cultural resistances slow down the spreading of our excellent products around the world: «In Italy, we are the best in one thing: food ignorance. Including me, of course. But we have products that the world envies us: had the French or the Spanish invented dried pasta it would have become a world symbol, not the joke it often becomes».
One can laugh, but only with joy, because of the great pasta dishes written over a decade and a half by Cannavacciuolo on Lake Orta Linguine di Gragnano, baby squid and Fobello bread sauce are now his emblem («But I didn’t do anything special», he belittles himself, «I only put bread and pasta together, two pillars in our cuisine»). Please note that this doesn’t mean his talent is less firm when it comes to fresh pasta. Try his Pasta and flowers, fresh egg pasta filled with a goat cream floating on tomato water. The nth masterpiece of a complete chef.
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Coxinas/ Petza’s impalpable raviolino Last Sunday, outside and inside the walls of restaurant S’Apposentu di Casa Puddu in Siddi, 60 km North of Cagliari, a sparkling edition of “Coxinas: durum wheat, territory and more", took place. It was a tribute to the protagonists and the great raw materials from Marmilla, Sardinia and Italy. We extensively spoke about it. We now focus on the genesis and the reasons behind two great pasta dishes that during the weekend reached the peak of as many last minute dinners, founded on improvisation by patron Roberto Petza, Mauricio Zillo (see dish below) and Roberta Pezzella, kneader of the (very great) breads served that evening.
The dish (in the photo by Pietro Pio Pitzalis) is called L’orto di Marmilla and encloses the best products, growing and grazing in this period in the region that hosted the event, inside a circle. It’s a sheep stock with vegetables (green chickpeas, French beans, courgettes, wild rocket salad, wild beets, celeriac leaves), aromatic herbs (basil, nasturtium, coriander, wild celery) and two small ravioli filled with orange zest and casu axedu, a chese made by making the milk curdle and adding the sour serum from the day before, in a sort of yogurt.
The veil texture of the raviolino was interesting: so thin it was almost impalpable. «The reason is», the author explained, «that ravioli in a stock is most of all a question of filling and the pasta is only the shell in which this is kept». An evanescent yet necessary presence for a superb dish of Ravioli in stock, «which is also the most important dish in our tradition, the best recipe to make a guest happy». In order to taste it, one needs to be quick because sheep have a very precise seasonality starting now and ending at the end of August, that is to say the period when dry grass gives sheep a nice and fat texture. How about the rest of the year? There’s chicken stock then.
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Coxinas/Zilio’s arriccia with sheep butter  Pasta, hay and a pinch of what was missing. This is a fine definition for a dish cooked in a jam session by Mauricio Zillo of Rebelot del Pont in Milan, who in Siddi was dazzled by the extraordinary waterfall of raw materials he had never heard of before. Pasta, in particular, has always been the queen in this part of Sardinia, a region that was once Italy’s durum wheat reservoir, but today has moved back due to a gradual conversion in agriculture.
In Marmilla, however, every day small producers repeat the triple imperative «resist, resist, resist» in order to keep formats such as marraconis filaus, tallutzas, lorighittas, semolina pillus alive. And also the arriccia ddedasa of Cooperativa Demetra in Siddi, shown in the photo, a sort of reginetta that Zillo had the bright idea of cooking al dente in a stock of toasted hay, that is to say seasonal herbs picked on the spot «because this pasta perfectly absorbs the cooking aromas». This is a simple format of dried pasta made with Senatore Cappelli durum wheat semolina, the island’s champ.
The pasta is creamed with sheep butter, which is that «pinch that was missing» and which his colleague Petza had to find as requested by the Brazilian chef («very hard to find, even here», he complained with a smile). And some goat curdle (callu de crabittu), a sort of “animal bottarga” that has a very gentle taste and gives a very pleasant “easy” touch to the final flavour. «However», Zillo finishes his explanation, «the architrave of this dish is the pasta, not the sauce. The very contrary of what I would have expected before coming to Italy. Good that this was the case». (photo credits Pietro Pio Pitzalis)
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Christian Milone pays a tribute to Marchesi and Italy Pasta with herbs and double tomato. A double dative in which Christian Milone of Trattoria Zappatori’s [i]Gastronavicella [/i]in Pinerolo (Torino) pays a tribute to Italian cuisine’s king - that is to say pasta with tomato sauce – and Open raviolo with parsley leaf in filigree by Gualtiero Marchesi.
However, in the mixture made by Milone with half egg yolks and half flour for his double lasagne, one can see everything but parsley: wild fennel, southernwood, lovage, geranium, basil, mint, sorrel and wood sorrel… The transparent herbs from his garden. Even the tomato is volatile, in its own right, as you can taste it but not see it. The reason is that the past is cooked at the end in the white tomato water (in bunches or a beefsteak when in season) obtained by percolation and cooked with a little tapioca.
The tomato will appear again in the shape of a “heart” that is to say the seeds and the gelatinous pasta, hidden at the base of the dish with some powdered lyophilised pesto. A see-non-see, taste-non-taste game. In the end, the client will have forgotten the initial idea behind the homage, lost, almost narcotised, in a spiral of flavour.
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RICETTA/ Gilmozzi’s incredible pasta salad  The menu of Identità Cortina’s picnic has taken a shape. The event took place last Sunday July 13th at El Brite de Larieto, with a series of exceptional chefs: Massimo Bottura, Alfio Ghezzi,Riccardo Gaspari, Gigi Dariz, Mauro Brun e Bruno Rebuffi, Massimo Alverà and Alessandro Favrin. The pasta side was assigned to Alessandro Gilmozzi, a mountain cuisine and pasta genius, both of which he always interprets with his food pressing the creativity gas pedal.
Cortina is no exception because the chef of El Molin in Cavalese will sign a very special pasta salad, the evolution of a dish he has in the menu, such as Extra virgin olive oil from Garda and the mountain, with the addition of eliche with Matt durum wheat by Felicetti and without the lichen. A very great concentrate of freshness, aromas and acidity that mostly come from 18 wild herbs (the photo by Carlo Baroni only gives us an idea). Who knows if, after that, one can start to change the trend between rice salad (which is the summer is cooked 9 times out of 10) and pasta salad (1 out of 10, if lucky).
Eliche with Matt wheat with extra virgin olive oil, herbs and mountain flowers
Recipe for 15 people
for the oil mousse
1 l milk
2 g pectin X58
3 g agar agar
250 g extra virgin olive oil from Trentino’s Garda
300 g cream
salt and pepper to taste
Reduce the milk to 400 g and divide it into halves. Add both the agar agar and the pectin to one of the two halves. Add the second part and bring to the boil. Add the oil, cream, salt and pepper. Strain the mixture in a cloth and put into a syphon charging twice. Keep at 5-6°C.
for the watercress ice cream
100 g mountain watercress
Extra virgin olive oil from Trentino’s Garda to taste
Pour the watercress and the olive oil in the paco jet tin, freeze and process before serving.
for the ice cream with sardines from lake Garda
3 eggs
130gr diced white bread
100gr lake sardines
300gr cream
8gr stabilizer
Whip the eggs in a bain-marie, add the sardines, the bread, the cream and the stabilizer. Pour into the paco jet tin and freeze.
the herbs
Stevia, wood sorrel, watercress, wild fennel, wild lemon balm, pimpinella, salvia officinalis, silene volgaris, timo silvestre, achillea millefolium, achillea argentata, alliaria petaiola, wild mint, wood chervil, wild spinach, shepherd’s purse, musk sprouts, plantain.
Bulbs, roots and buds
Flower buds (before opening) of dandelions and borage: if blanched, they become “fake capers”. Wild liquorish root. Shepherd’s purse’s root. When grated, one adds sweetness and the other is similar to ginger.
Flowers
Violets, nasturtium, achillea, alliaria petaiola, wild lemon balm flowers, geranium.
the 4 oil texture
1 extra virgin olive oil
2 Extra virgin olive oil mousse (preparing an emulsion with a dairy part)
3 Extra virgin olive oil and watercress ice cream
4 Candy: sugar candy with extra virgin olive oil
for the eliche with Matt durum wheat by Felicetti
1 l water
5 crushed juniper berries
5 elderberry flowers
Cervia salt
hemp oil to taste
Bring the water to the boil, add salt, the juniper bods, the pasta and cook for 4 minutes. Turn off the gas, add the elderberry flowers, leave for 7 minutes. Drain and cool. Season with a drop of hemp oil.
Final composition
In a Martini glass, or in a glass dish, put the pasta, sprinkle the mousse, add a ball of sardine ice cream and one of watercress and create a bouquet with the aromatic herbs. Create the oil pearls using 100 g of isomalt. After melting the isomalt at 121°C one can shape it using a mould for pearls: let a drop of oil fall into the mould, it will be wrapped by the caramel.
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RECIPE/Pasquale Palamaro and the bicoloured tortello  Pasquale Palamaro is from Ischia right to the filling. Each dish of his needs to recall the island, a scent of the sea, a root hidden in the volcanic soil. In this case the tortello is bicoloured because the chef at restaurant Indaco inside hotel Regina Isabella wanted to summarize Ischia in the pasta: the green of the fields and the sun shining strong above them. The darker line is a mix of wild herbs (borage, chicory, spinach and beets) boiled and mixed with the lighter one, which is a pasta made with egg yolks and flour.
The filling of the tortello is an blended aubergine parmigiana, the fondue adds some fat and the black of the taggiasche olives gives a gloomy chromatic power to a dish that couldn’t be any sunnier. Attention please: if you’re interested in the dry side, which dominates in Palamaro, bet on his Linguine with moray eel acquapazza, spinach roots and lemon. Another great summary of the island.
Bicoloured tortello with aubergine parmigiana, fondue made with provolone podolico and powdered black olives
Ingredients for 4 people
for the white pasta
100 g “00” flour
40 g egg yolks
10 g extra virgin olive oil
10 g water
for the green pasta
100 g “00” flour
40 g egg yolk
10 g per kind of blanched herbs (beets, borage, spinach, chicory)
for the filling
400 g aubergine parmigiana prepared the previous day
for the provolone podolico sauce
80 g provolone
200 g milk
30 g 50% fat cream
for the olive earth
80 g taggiasche olives
50 g breadcrumbs
10 g semolina
1 g cocoa
0,5 g powdered coffee
Method
Knead the egg pasta putting all the ingredients in a planetary processor, while for the green one boil all the vegetables and then cool them. Blend the vegetables with the egg yolks and put everything into the planetary kneading as with the yellow pasta. Roll out the two pastas about 1-2 cm thick. Without adding any flour, place one on top of the other. Roll the two layers and make a roll of around 10 cm diameter, wrap it in cling film and leave in the fridge for at least 4 hours. Meanwhile, prepare the filling for the tortelli.
The previous day, cook the aubergine melanzana following the traditional recipe and then leave to cool. Using a bimby processor blend the parmigiana so as to obtain a think yet velvety cream and transfer everything into a pastry-bag. Prepare the cheese fondue, bring the milk and the cream to the boil, add the provolone, cover with cling film and leave the pot on the counter so as to let the temperature go down slowly. When the fondue has reached around 40°C, process in a Turbomix for 10 minutes at the highest power and move the fondue into a hot bain-marie.
For the olive earth, remove the bones from the olives and chop them roughly, then put the chopped olives onto kitchen paper so as to remove the exceeding water. Mix the remaining ingredients and put everything into the oven at 75°C for 2 hours. After this time has passed, process everything in the Bimby processor as quick as possible in order to obtain a crispy sand. Keep in a hot and dry place.
Pull out the pasta from the fridge and cut some very thin slices with a slicer. Fill in the shape of a tortello with the previously prepared filling. Boil the tortelli in hot and salted water. Once the cooking is completed, put them in a cold pan with a drop of oil and some cooking water. Put the fondue in the centre of the plates, place the tortelli on top and then sprinkle some olive sand and serve very warm.
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