Monograno Felicetti

Dear {NOMEUTENTE}
Yesterday I had a luscious and delicious, precise and intelligent lunch, in a game of balance between lots of tradition and territory, but also the right and brilliant creative additions of patron-chef Antonio Petrone, who has two princesses in the dining room and cellar, his wife Imma and sister-in-law Lucia, who go under the surname of Ferrara.

Their restaurant, opened on the 1st of August 2010, is behind Salerno, in Acquamela di Baronissi, tel. +39.089.954740. It has a beautiful name, Pensando a te [thinking of you] and a varied menu, with enough options given they use fresh products. There are five first courses, four pastas, of which one is filled, and a risotto, strictly for two people. I avoided these because from Rome southwards, I prefer dry pasta much more; it makes more sense, which means many things, all of which positive.

First the Spaghettoni with garlic and oil and rayed artemis in broccoli cooking water. Good but I expected a stronger seafood note. Then the paccheri with amberjack sauce, a little chilli pepper and wild fennel, almost perfect. Finally the Candele pasta with Genovese sauce and onion from Montoro. A sublime Genovese.

Genovese is a ragout made with onions and beef, cooked for half a day. Finding a really good one is difficult because it is almost unknown faraway from Vesuvius. It has never conquered the world, not even Italy. As Luciano Pignataro wrote on his blog in early 2016: “I was thinking about how this recipe, besides being the most popular in town and in part of Campania, is still totally unknown outside the region”.

Putting the time needed to prepare it aside, which is a serious obstacle, everything is based on two ingredients: onion and tomato. This is the hard part, giving character and depth to something that is initially so simple. The rest is details, pawns in a game of chess. In the end the sauce is almost sweet. Disappointment is round the corner as even history, memory and rhetoric disappear when you change region. What’s left is the recipe itself, this is what you judge.

Antonio Petrone’s Geneovese is the exception. He hides behind the quality of the onions from Montoro, a village near Avellino where he lives. It’s a good starting point, to which he then adds the brains, heart and hands of a chef.


Paolo Marchi
, content by Gabriele Zanatta
 

Seventh seal for Identità di Pasta

This year Identità di Pasta celebrates its seventh edition. At the end of each of the previous ones, I always thought we had reached the top, in terms of interpreters but most of all of ideas. Then the following year I was always proved wrong. I hope I’ll find myself in the same situation on Wednesday the 9th of March 2016.

This edition’s premises are surely important: the names of the speakers all belong to people who know the subject of pasta well. Professionals who have been studying it for a long time, they’re not improvising for the sake of making something spectacular. They’re forerunners of a theme and a food category that in these past few years has literally exploded, and not only in terms of fine dining, which has acted as a propeller for all the segments in the sector.

What Alessandro Negrini said a few days ago made me smile: «If at the restaurant they serve you 20 dishes without ever including pasta, it means they were 20 starters». This is very true because in Italy pasta sets the timing, it marks a changing point in the meal, it separates what comes before and what next. This is why on the 8th of March we’ll try to make it as noble as ever, in the free space of Sala Blu 1.
Riccardo Felicetti
(In the photo in the middle, with Carlo Cracco at Identità Expo)
 

Carlo Cracco, the saga continues

The seventh edition of Identità di Pasta, on Tuesday 8th March 2016, will open with a welcome return: on the stage of durum wheat, for the first time after three editions, Carlo Cracco of restaurant Cracco in Milan will appear (lesson at 10.20 am). In 2013 the chef from Vicenza, at the time with his ex sous-chef Matteo Baronetto beside him, had surprised the audience with a memorable dish: Rigatoni with mastica (stressing the “i”) and raw porcini. He’s now ready to update his very rich portfolio with twenty years of first courses (we had written about it recently here).

The content of his lesson is still unknown but we’re curious to understand how the extraordinary twenty-years-old portfolio of dry (or fresh) pasta of the chef from Vicenza will be updated. His approach has always been of using pasta as a pillar, and not an ordinary vessel. A few examples? We recalled them on our website some time ago: Ravioli with goat milk, with porcini and herbs (1997), Fried spaghetti with tomato compote and fried basil (2002), Gruyère paccheri (a seeming pasta, from 2004), the very famous Ravioli stuffed with sea urchin mayonnaise and basil seeds (2006), Spaghetti with red pepper and salted anchovies (2012)…
 

Overcooking pasta with Negrini and Pisani

Alessandro Negrini and Fabio Pisani: the guys from Il Luogo di Aimo e Nadia in Milan will given an encore (at 11.10) of the ‘northern complot’ that took place a few days ago in the Milanese event by Le Strade della Mozzarella. Here’s a quote from Carlo Passera’s feature on that lesson.

«Negrini turned every dogma upside down, overcooking pasta for 50 minutes. Overcooked pasta is not a new thing in fine dining. Think of Davide Scabin, who uses it as if it were play-dough for his Bombolone di pasta. Or Alfio Ghezzi, who enhanced a justified common place against Trentino («People from Milan say pasta cooked in Naples is raw, while that in Trento is overcooked, and someone from Naples says the one in Milan is overcooked already», said Paolo Marchi) in his Spaghetti alla chitarra smalzadi, capable of “making noble” an overcooked pasta later seasoned with diced potatoes, shallot and a jus of veal, all this tossed in a pan with meat sauce (“smalzadi” in the local dialect).

Negrini takes a further step ahead, again with the complicity of the chef from Trentino: his idea, born from the confrontation with Riccardo Felicetti, looks like a normal dish of pasta but in fact is not. He uses a special format, Calamarata di Gragnano from Pastificio dei Campi, which he (over)cooks for 50 minutes, so that each “calamari” keeps it shape but changes texture, which now in the palate seems like a cream of wheat. After having drained it, he cools it down so its gluten structure is stabilised; he then seasons it with a sort of trip around Italy of delicious ingredients, respecting the style and tradition that are typical of Il Luogo di Aimo e Nadia».
 

Nicola Fossaceca: between seafood and durum wheat

New speech (at 12), new debutant on the stage of Identità Milano. Nicola Fossaceca, chef from Abruzzo at the helm of Al Metrò in San Salvo (Chieti), will bring his special interpretation of dry pasta to which he loves to add the Adriatic sea, in the same way, only a little further to the South, in which Moreno Cedroni conquered him.

The 33-year-old chef from Chieti still won’t reveal to the public the content of his dish on the 8th of March but it will certainly feature his favourite seafood-durum wheat pair, the same with which, on a hot day in late June, he refreshed the participants at Identità Expo, with Spaghettoni with squilla mantis and oysters (in the photo by Brambilla/Serrani), a successful meeting of poor ingredients, squilla mantis, and luxury ones, oysters. The poor and the rich. The chef cooked pasta strictly al dente, made it “relax” in the pan with the water from the oysters. Who knows what will happen in Sala Blu 1.

 

Camanini and cacio e pepe cooked in a bladder

“Simply pasta” is the title of Riccardo Camanini’s lesson (at 12.50) from restaurant Lido 84 in Gardone Riviera. «I chose it», says the shy chef from the province of Brescia, «because I’m not very fond of self-celebrations or of themes that risk giving too much value to what we do. My cooking is very simple. Perhaps the pairings are unusual but it’s linear».

We can’t wait to see the two dishes created for Sala Blu 1, which have also never been shown before: «I’ll never put them in the menu before the 9th of March and they will never appear in the list: in fact they might be part of the “Oscillazioni” menu, the more creative one, which changes every month depending on what’s available». Hear, hear: the first dish will be «A real Cacio e pepe but with Felicetti kamut rigatoni cooked in a pig’s bladder, in the classic French way». Classic so to speak: the French have always cooked inside chicken and roosters, but never pasta. Enough previews for now, or else there’ll be no pleasure.

Second recipe and a new original success: «These will be Felicetti egg tagliatelle with mimosa. A soapy flavour, tending to bitter, which will surprise you. It’s my homage on the 8th of March to all women». And to us who are waiting curiously.
 

Matias Perdomo: pasta as freedom

Meno per più, uguale libertà [Minus times plus, equals freedom] The title of the lesson by Matias Perdomo (at 2.10 pm) of Contraste (Milan) is already special. What does the chef from Uruguay mean? «It means ‘Less volume times more desire = the freedom of appreciating dry pasta for what it truly is. It’s the evolution of 7-8 years of research on this food. I will give justice to this very noble raw material, of which I’ll diminish the volume because it’s not just the vessel for a sauce or the container of a filling, but it’s also a product that I’m excited about thanks to all its historical and social significance: pasta travelling around the world, pasta connected with war, pasta as a panacea and comfort for the suffering. A universal symbol on which we bet a lot around the world».

He defends pasta as seen from the eyes of a non-Italian (or an almost Italian), eyes that are freer to multiply the points of view on paccheri and spaghetti: «With the first of the two first courses I’ll try to trap into a can the scent we smell in the stairs when we go back home. There’s always a neighbour cooking pasta without paying too much attention to the consequences. With the second course I’ll speak of a sort of return to the essence of pasta: I’ll only use flour, water and time». In the end, everyone will be able to enjoy a tasting of Garlic, oil, chilli pepper, baby calamari and anchovy colatura, «As simple as it gets».

 

Cristina Bowerman: recycling becomes haute

Pasta and fine dining: one day later. Use and re-use of pasta. Cristina Bowerman of Glass Hostaria knows what she wants for her lesson (at 3 pm) even though she first had to go through the healthy exercise of doubt: «It took me a while to define the content because everything seemed a little banal». What is banal for the Apulian chef, however, is original for a normal chef.

The basic idea will be developed through a double thread: «Recuperating in the kitchen can be intended in the recycling sense linked with Expo. In this sense I’ll present a metamorphic version of pasta the day after. Something along the line of spaghetti wanting to become lasagne. Well, not that exactly but it’s to give an idea... Which I’ll try to make more complex and thus more interesting».

Second thread: «I will present my metamorphic version of pasta served the day after. A non-immediate cooking of dry pasta, in a cold infusion for 24 hours. Not a precooked pasta, so to speak, but a pasta cooked differently». There’s an interesting trait d’union between the two dishes: «traditionally recipes based on the re-use of pasta belong to a simpler restaurant offer. I will offer two examples that I hope can also establish themselves in the haute segment».
 

Peppe Guida, endearing and sustainable

After Camanini and Fossaceca, here comes another absolute debut at Identità (at 3.50 pm). It’s Peppe Guida of Antica Osteria Nonna Rosa in Vico Equense (Naples), «But I’m ready to double soon», he reveals on the telephone, «thanks to a farm that I’m renovating in the countryside». We’ll see and taste some day.

Let’s move to pasta: who better than him, among chefs from Campania, can speak about it? He’s one of the few who have a tasting menu only including pasta, «A journey with 8 courses», of which Valentina Santonastaso told us about, “what with vegetarian, seafood, meat and traditional dishes”. «In Milan», says the chef, «I would like to bring dishes with an endearing simplicity, with very poor and excellent raw materials. Because unfortunately dry pasta is still undervalued in fine dining: I notice this when I visit my colleagues. They’re all afraid that if you mistake the cooking by 30 seconds, the dish will be a failure».

Dish number one: «It will be Spaghetti with garlic and oil without oil. A totally vegetarian dish, and without fat, to show that you can make an excellent dish with two ingredients we all have at home». Second chapter: «Calle pasta with shallot, cheese and 'nduja, a rather special new take on Genovese sauce. They’re both dishes that try to follow the concept of sustainability, in order to safeguard the new generations».
(photo by scattidigusto.it)
 

Ciccio Sultano and spaghetti’s virility

How can you forget Spaghetti kneaded with carrot juice in a taratatà sauce and aroma of lemon verbena by Ciccio Sultano (photo)? The chef from Duomo in Ibla brought them at Identità London, in October 2011. And we’re happy to learn about his approach to pasta, almost 5 years later (at 4.40 pm).

Local products from Ragusa will be the pillar of two dishes, one with dry pasta, the other with fresh pasta: «There will also be tomato», he anticipates on the telephone, «and a sauce of sanapo, a wild mustard we use as almonds. These will both represent our modern cuisine, linked to the pleasure of the palate but also to more cerebral aspects. Expressions of a territory and stories of the moment we’re living. A very mature period, compared to the past, even though we try never to neglect the pleasure-loving and goliardic essence of food».

Indeed, his tone becomes playful right away: «For us Sicilians, pasta is long. We see short formats as a reduction. Perhaps, in a Freudian way, we always feel we need be virile».
 

The show ends with magician Davide Scabin

Last year, the day dedicated to pasta ended with Massimo Bottura. This year the last to get on the stage – moderated by journalist Eleonora Cozzella, presenter of all the previous 6 editions – will be Davide Scabin of Combal.zero, the pasta king (at 5.30 pm).

As usual, the content of the lesson is top secret. Riccardo Felicetti, the historic armed branch of the chef from Rivoli manages to tell us something: «He’s working at a couple of new concepts, always with pasta as a material and not as a format. A reflection on mass itself, an evolution of the sofficini prepared for the Foodcleanic and of the bombolone cacio e pepe. I’ll say no more»

Meanwhile, we enliven our brains and salivation thinking about last year’s lesson, with Pasta in burnia, that is to say under oil, in a jar; with the Pasta play-dough, overcooked and then blended. And of course with the Amatriciana in a pressure cooker, a technique that created such an uproar it reached Michelle Obama.