Dear {NOMEUTENTE}As usual, the last field filled in our newsletter is the initial greeting. This is the case this time too, at the end of a Sunday spent in the evening in Polignano, a little south of Bari, presenting XXL, 50 piatti che hanno allargato la mia vita after today’s Il pranzo possibile at Tuccino, with patron Pasquale Centrone, at one. It was a charity event to collect funds for research on ALS, the terrible disease that has kept Pasquale stuck on a wheelchair for the past seven years.
So now I’m in Apulia, and when reading the first news below, signed by Riccardo Felicetti, and thinking in my bedroom about the first dish I tasted at midnight, orecchiette with burnt wheat, I was sure the restaurant industry and the research connected to it will always be evolving. Even though one may sometimes think that we cannot eat better or worse than we do, dishes, ideas, tastes, techniques, consumption will always change together with the factors at work.
I say this because I owe Pietro Zito the discovery years ago of pasta with burnt wheat, with the great chef and farmer from Montegrosso d’Andria who told the story of a wheat recuperated for the poor, so that you could have a precise idea before ordering it or moving further. So tonight those taking the order thought it was a given fact that everyone around the table knew about it – indeed they did – but there was a feeling of conformism. Those traditional dishes that everyone, from Gargano to Leuca, now have and know by heart. And when you lack in originality, it’s the end, you need to reinvent yourself and fast.
Paolo Marchi, content by Carlo Passera, photo by Brambilla/Serrani |
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Felicetti: conquering American palates  On 29th June I participated in the Sofi Awards in New York, the most important food competition in the US, with a jury formed by buyers and important journalists from that country. 33 products received awards and special mentions (see the complete list here). Among these, only two Italian products were mentioned: a spread made with pistachios from Sicily and a balsamic vinegar mixed with organic apple juice.
I certainly don’t doubt these two products are good but at first I wanted to write that the US is no country for Italian products. And not because they didn’t award pasta – in 2014 I was mentioned thanks to matt spaghettoni and kamut rigatoni, respectively in the “pasta” and “organic products” categories. The reason why I’m worried is that for now, it is difficult for the American market and palate – two important objectives for each one of us – to recognise what is good, that is to say products that are strictly connected to our tradition, the most authentic one. The trend has moved towards product varieties that are extremely complex, stereotypes seconding tastes that are foreign to our culture, based on the highest quality, on naturalness and simplicity above all.
Yet a bad news in the short term is also an excellent news in the long term: if today a suitable culinary culture is missing in the US, it means we have endless prairies in front of us where to spread it. How? First of all, by always keeping the quality standards high with everything we produce, with a total (non nostalgic) respect for tradition. Second, we need to stimulate the capacity of institutions - Ice, Italian Trade Agency, and all those who promote to different degrees Italian food products abroad – to start correct lobby policies. We will thus be able to spread the perception of our products and of all the marvellous things we can make with them overseas.
Riccardo Felicetti
(in the photo with his father Valentino, "working with pasta for 66 years") |
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Pasta and beans by Antonia Klugmann During last Friday’s lesson at “Identità di pasta”, the great chef working at restaurant Argine in Vencò al Collio, on the border between Italy and Slovenia, chef Antonia Klugmann from Trieste, offered a splendid version of Pasta e fagioli. «Of course, the name of this recipe should not be interpreted with melancholy», she stressed at the beginning. Beans are her passion: «I cultivate them personally, I only pick them when they reach the peak of their maturity. They have slightly suffered from the heat of these days, too bad». See, speaking of seasonality makes no sense for Klugmann: rhythm is not given by textbooks or the pre-established orders that are so popular online, but by her sensitivity, which changes with the weather.
«In Triveneto, beans are traditionally paired with barley or spelt. And usually a third element is added, lard or pork cheek, left over elements. I decided to use salmì tongue, typical of my area. It takes my trusted butcher 2-4 weeks to prepare it. Yet I’m not satisfied: I decided to make it nobler with a further work, to the delight of my cooks». The desperation of Antonia’s collaborators was often mentioned during the lesson finely timed by journalist Eleonora Cozzella: «I ask my collaborators the necessary sensitivity to allow a product to make a leap. I’m very strict on the pass: if the tongue is not the way I want it, I send it back. Being the controller is my perverse pleasure».
This is what marks the difference between a cook and a star. How about pasta? «It also makes the difference. I love Monograno Felicetti spelt ditalini. I used them very often in soups at Venissa too. In this case I cook them for 4 minutes and a half in boiling water and then finish with the bean cream».
«This dish is a blast», announces after tasting it dean Valentino Felicetti, «who has been working with pasta for 66 years». Still, you will never see the chef overjoyed because of a compliment: «I once believed I would gradually become easier to please, I would become more understanding with my collaborators», she confesses, «Instead, I realise I’m more and more unsatisfied and intolerant, a tendency I have and know I need to control». This worried perfectionism will certainly not be noticed by guests at Argine: «I ask my partner to omit, when serving, all the difficult steps that are behind each dish. Clients should never perceive the effort of a chef. They just need to enjoy themselves». |
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Conchiglioni with conchiglie by Mantovani Conchiglioni with conchiglie, a real tongue twister, the dish presented by Fabrizio Mantovani of bistro Fm in Faenza (Ravenna). The recipe starts from tradition, with a splash of Adriatic Sea, inspired by France where snails are very popular and where the chef, born in Romagna, started to work again in the kitchen after his break as a base-guitar player in the “Frutta e Verdura Band”.
What came first, pasta or pasta sauce? The son of two greengrocers, Mantovani feels at home among the stands and during a trip to the fish market in Bellaria he met this strange mollusc with a thorny shell, murex, and it was love at first sight. «Garusi [the other name for murex] has a texture similar to kidneys and a strong flavour full of iodine, when I decided to make a ragout sauce with fish instead of meat the idea came natural» the chef explains. The choice of the mollusc is then matched with the pasta shells so that the murex can almost “jump” from one shell to the other.
The inspiration for the dish is also regulated by the shape and colour of the ingredients: Form Follows Food is the motto of the FFF project curated by the chef himself who, among his many passions, also includes design. The choice was also inspired by his diet, for four years now free of meat, and by geography, as Faenza is the culinary and cultural crossroads of culinary inspirations.
The ragout recipe is the typical one from Romagna, except for the chosen protein. We start with the mirepoix, then the murex, roughly chopped (previously cleaned and blanched in acid water), the adding of Sangiovese and of course the peeled tomatoes left to cook for endless hours, cradled by the scents of juniper and cinnamon.
The woody and balsamic notes of the molluscs are well matched by a sugary Riesling, a young Sangiovese from Tuscany or even that small and rare autochthonous grape variety called Centesimino, once called Red Sauvignon. The music continues following the Fm@rket, a new project by Mantovani, a “natural market” of sustainable products, not just organic, to take home or taste on location. Save the date, therefore, at the end of September, on the same frequency.
Valeria Senigaglia |
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Nicola Fossaceca: let’s go to the sea With his Spaghettoni with squilla mantis and oysters, Nicola Fossaceca of restaurant Al Metrò in San Salvo (Ch) has moved the Identità Expo pavilion to the shores of the Adriatic Sea. A dish which is ideally born in the family pastry-shop: with the aroma of the bombolone as an eau de cologne, he starts cooking spaghetti allo scoglio and fried fish to be served with beer in the restaurant, but his cooking is more appreciated than the drinks and the cook becomes a chef.
Fossaceca was caught and inspired in his journey towards gourmet fish by a book by Moreno Cedroni, "Sushi& Susci", and by a dinner signed by the same author who, together with other great chefs such as Mauro Uliassi and Maria Lombardi, is also Fossaceca’s mentor. Today Nicola applies his passion for experiments to the magnificent products from the Adriatic Sea.
This guy presented a marriage of poor ingredients, squilla mantis, and luxury and luxurious ones, oysters. A recipe that has the aroma of the sun and the sea and matches the freshness of cucumbers with the scents of lemon and aromatic herbs in order to enhance the sapidity of the shellfish. You need to smell this dish, before tasting it, and for Nicola, a chef who pays attention to aromas, cooking is nice because «Scents please me more than flavours, when I close my eyes in the kitchen and smell the aroma of a dish, a moment of pure joy arrives».
The chef cooks pasta strictly al dente and then lets it “relax” in the pan with a sauce made with oyster, he places it on a creamy layer of blended raw squilla mantis and finishes it with raw oysters. The irony notes of the oysters are well balanced by the aroma of the lemon, of the wild fennel recalling the countryside and of the basil underlining the summer, finishing with chilly pepper, tarragon and cucumber, a bridge between land and sea, recalling the notes of watermelon in the oysters. The final touch is a crispy and delicious note of pan-fried bread which highlights the sapidity and adds a touch of tradition.
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Spaghetti and quinto quarto: Sabrina Tuzi Sabrina Tuzi, chef at Degusteria del Gigante in San Benedetto del Tronto (Ascoli Piceno), was born in 1984 but already has lots of experience. She’s one of the most interesting female chefs in Italy, and at Identità Expo she focused on Spaghettoni Pastificio Felicetti monograno Matt, «I like them a lot, I like tenacious spaghetti» (these have a diameter of 2.3 mm, instead of the 1.8 of normal spaghetti).
She serves them with “double quinto quarto” [quinto quarto, with regards to meat, is usually translated as offal]. The fish one, is made with cazole (called thus from the Italian word calzoncini, shorts), the ovarian sacks of fish, once considered second-quality food for sailors and today sold to consumers too, without too much attention to the fish they come from. At home, they’re often used raw, to season pasta. Tuzi instead prefers to process them, «so that the end result resembles bottarga. Or a sheep-milk cheese». They are thus blanched and then marinated in salt, brown sugar and green anise from Castignano, a very aromatic variety from the Marche, slightly smaller, with green highlights (it is the base for the famous Anisetta Meletti).
Then the chef takes lots of good, wild herbs: wild chicory, sow thistles, dandelions, nettles, chards, wild nettles, aniseed. She extracts the aroma with an extractor. The same herbs also become the vegetal “offal”: the fibres left from the extraction – usually discarded – are dried in the oven and become the dish’s crispy base. “Feeding the planet”, the theme of Expo 2015, also means using waste...
She then dishes out the pasta aromatised with herbs, adds mauve flowers and parsley and garnishes with some grated cazole, as if it were bottarga. |
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Lombardo: lagane and chickpeas, today and tomorrow The very traditional Lagane e ceci, the recipe presented by Vitantonio Lombardo at Identità Expo, included a more refined version, with egg pappardelle, without any water, in this case made by Pastificio Felicetti. They undergo a double cooking. One third is fried, the rest is boiled in water, «We thus recuperate an old habit from Cilento. When housekeepers rolled out the pasta, the one that broke was then fried. It is, after all, the same logic as Salento’s Ciceri e tria», says the chef from Locanda Severino in Caggiano (Salerno).
A double Slow Food Presidium for the two chickpea varieties used. The one from Cireale becomes a cream to be placed on the bottom of the dish, then the fried pasta is added to give different aromas and textures. Then there’s the boiled pappardelle seasoned with a sauce made with onion, pork rind and rosemary and black chickpeas from Murgia, «a variety that was about to disappear. It was cultivated with other varieties but it has harder and more resistant seeds that require longer cooking times. This is why it was slowly replaced with other less “demanding” varieties», until it was recently rediscovered.
The dishing out includes a little crispy, crumbled pancetta, curly parsley roughly hand-chopped and powdered chilli pepper to garnish: it is best to mix before eating, the result is double yummy.
Why this recipe? «Because it perfectly represents my territory but it has a new, modern take. It is no chance it was the first dish conceived at Locanda Severino, as soon as it was open, in January 2009 [in February 2012 Lombardo became its owner. In the same year, a Michelin star began to shine above it]. It later had various evolutions». This is what the chef is like: suspended between opposite inclinations, recuperating and innovating.
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Polenta blessed in the summer with Gaspari Riccardo Gaspari, chef at El Brite de Larieto in Cortina d’Ampezzo (Belluno) brings a dish from the mountains: Tagliatelle with goat ragout on a cream of white polenta from Veneto which is rather unusual on a particularly hot day in early June. Yet he’s soon forgiven. First, because he justifies it in these words: «It represents our soul, our cooking». Second, because it is only a very creamy base, which gives aromatic notes rather than increasing the temperature. Third, because as Eleonora Cozzella rightly notes, the good modern chef «knows how to combine all that represents tradition and territory but in a creative way».
The pasta is Tagliatelle Monograno Felicetti with Matt bio durum wheat: only one variety, no blends, for a pasta that is very aromatic and is very rich in proteins. The grains come from Sicily and Apulia, while the rest of the dish comes from Cortina, on the road to Passo tre Croci, where Brite de Larieto is located, together with the farm run by his father Flavio, with vegetables, cows, goats and pigs, a small dairy farm he opened recently and a laboratory for cured meat...
The chef presents his bucolic childhood, amidst piglets and goats, and meanwhile he continues with the recipe. He toasts some white corn flour, then cooks it as if per a normal polenta, and then blends it to create a rather liquid cream, which he later strains.
Meanwhile, the ragout is simmering, the pasta is cooking and is then creamed with (very cold) butter, so as to increase its creaminess, and a little Grana Padano. The polenta goes below, then he sprinkles some polenta wafers made with sponcio corn. This variety grows mainly in Val Belluna, close to the Parco Nazionale Dolomiti Bellunesi. Finally, he adds tagliatelle, ragout, salted ricotta and thyme to aromatise everything. |
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With Martini Puttanesca gets to heaven  «I could have prepared pasta with caviar or lobster, making a good impression would have been easy». But Marco Martini of Stazione di Posta in Testaccio, Rome, didn’t want to. He loves to make popular tradition noble. So he brought Penne alla puttanesca, a delicious dish, at Expo, «It is one of those dishes you prepare at midnight when you get home and find out the fridge is empty». Yet there’s always a few capers, anchovies, tomato in the pantry, says Martini. They’re enough.
Of course, the traditional recipe is always a starting point, a point of reference that has been turned into a myth, «I thought about mothers going to the market to buy those magic powders to make puttanesca. We home made them». He chose penne, «because nobody every uses them», they are cooked in tomato water made by straining a sort of panzanella of raw tomato, oil, salt, pepper and oregano through a cloth, «a way to include some further technical elements in the dish. Besides, the flavours are then extraordinarily concentrated».
Martini thus prepares three powders, dehydrating Gaeta olives, capers and anchovies in the oven. When it’s time to dish out, on the base goes a sauce made by cooking parsley in boiling water, moving it into ice to keep the green colour and then blending it. Some teaspoons of the tomato pulp from which the water was taken are then put on the side. The penne go on top, garnished with the three powders and some fresh chervil.
An intelligent dish, one of the most popular at Stazione di Posta, which can boast a kitchen that counts 6 people and a total of 106 years of age. |
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Gilmozzi: linguine from the woods The dishes prepared by Alessandro Gilmozzi of Molin in Cavalese (Trento) are like him: they whisper, charm without screaming. Still, perhaps for this very reason, they are in fact extremely refined. In other words, they are his extraordinary legitimate children, revealing the magic touch of their creator: a sort of hidden charm seems to allow the chef to master with incredible talent the subtle science of aroma. He knows how to handle herbs, spices, essences like few others; he creates combinations of fantastic, explosive, sparkling goodness.
At Identità Expo Gilmozzi delighted everyone with his Spelt linguine creamed in aromatised butter, raw porcini, marinated venison and mint essence, a small virtuosic cooking masterpiece. The chef picks peppermint near his brooks and juices them («Better if slowly. To enrich the dish with chlorophyll, I use leaves and the tall part of the stem; not the lower one as it is too bitter»). He thus makes an essence he keeps in the fridge at 4°C. He then moves to the meat, a beautiful grilled loin which he cuts into 2 cm cubes and marinates with salt from Cervia, oil with juniper and powdered canine roses which add unexpected sensations, as if it were paprika, but less spicy and with a stronger aroma.
Gilmozzi chooses Felicetti spelt linguine: «I like it because it is the most ancient cereal cultivated by man. I use this kind of ingredients very often, especially for my desserts: I make ice cream with kamut tagliatelle with butter smoked with cardamom, ilrumtopf (pasta cooked in a fruit alcoholic-sweet syrup), macaroons made with pumpkin, canine rose and spelt…».
The linguine are creamed in the butter aromatised with garlic chopped without its heart, celery, shallot, mustard, Swiss pine nuts, salt from Cervia, pepper smoked on the spot, confit porcini and speck. All the ingredients, finely chopped, are mixed with yellow mountain butter.
When preparing the dish, raw porcini finely cut are put on the side, together with the venison cubes, followed by the mountain cress sprouts and a touch of mint essence. «I want my guests to eat the woods. A simple lichen is enough to give an extraordinary bitter-sweet complexity to a scallop». |
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Andrea Aprea: a truly delicious calamarata Andrea Aprea, Neapolitan chef from restaurant Vun, in the Park Hyatt hotel in Milan, has pasta running in his blood and Gragnano, the homeland to the most famous Italian food in the world, in his heart. At Expo he tested himself with a truly Neapolitan format, Calamarata, named thus because it recalls calamari rings.
«Calamarata with veal genovese sauce and pecorino mousse with saffron», he explained, «is a dish that comes from the heart rather than from the mind». It’s a Sunday delicacy, in a lighter version: for the genovese sauce veal is used instead of the traditional pork or beef (the parts that are richer in collagen, so the sauce is thicker). The proportions are the traditional ones, half meat and half onion – the Ramata di Montoro variety -, with the vegetable giving the typical reddish colour because of its caramelised sugars during the cooking. There’s no tomato!
Then the chef prepares a mousse with pecorino romano, chosen because it is more sapid, «In this recipe there’s no more salt», and adds the saffron threads. Finally a few watercress leaves, «adding spicy and bitter notes, while the genovese sauce is sweet, the pecorino sapid, the pasta gives texture. It is a very craveable dish, with intense aromatic peaks, inducing a pleasant salivation». In other words, we could eat it again and again. |
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No-waste mezze penne by Franco Aliberti This dish is signed by Franco Aliberti of restaurant Èvviva in Riccione (Martino Lapini recently wrote about it on the Identità Golose website). It has courgette become the emblem of no-waste, a dish that is representative of an eco-aware cuisine. It looks like Green mezze penne on a cream of courgettes. In fact, the four vegetal ingredients are given by the same vegetable. The stalks are used for the mezze penne, the fruit for the cream, the leaves are blanched and the flower gives the crispy note. With some sprinkled rice cheese on top. |
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Apreda and arrabbiata seen from Mumbai Penne Monograno Felicetti all’arrabbiata (Blend Spicy Bomba-y), a great classic in popular Italian cuisine was interpreted by Francesco Apreda at lunchtime and in the evening at Identità Expo, a few days ago. The chef from restaurant Imago inside hotel Hassler in Rome is also rather familiar with India.
And you can tell: «I dedicated this dish to Mumbai», he explained, «Pasta is cooked in a liquid extracted from roasted peppers, tomato, with a little vinegar, salt and sugar. The blend I used for this dish is based on Indian chilli pepper, tomato, coriander seeds, fennel, paprika and lime zest. The pasta is placed on some yogurt, black garlic flakes, a salad made with cucumbers, mango and papaya. A great and very fresh summer dish. |
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