Rambling again - a pasta dish

"Best eaten after sturdy exercise in the open air." The Food of Italy

This is a typical Rosemary's ramble, beginning with the usual what to cook for dinner, which includes some leftovers, passing through a book from the pile on my desk, including a side-step to Yotam Ottolanghi and ending up with quaint Italians. I am still not sure how dinner will pan out - indeed it may go in another direction entirely. Anyway it was a fun ramble, so I'll try to be reasonably logical, although rambles never are are they?

It began with a leftover problem - Jamie's Hustle Brussels and this picture of pizzoccheri - a buckwheat pasta from Northern Italy. I'm still not certain how it will end. So let's ramble.

The two definitions for ramble are: a walk for pleasure in the countryside and talk or write at length in a confused and inconsequential way. This particular ramble will be mostly of the second type, although with definite links to 'walks for pleasure', though why a ramble has to be around the countryside I really don't know. I can ramble around towns just as happily as around the countryside - even a ramble around a supermarket is fun. That's the whole point about a ramble isn't it? You make it up as you go along.

I suppose this ramble didn't really begin with that recipe, but it was a recipe I had earmarked in one of my Op shop purchases, The Food of Italy from Murdoch Books, and which will get a post of its own some other time, and it was at the back of my mind as I pondered on my next leftovers problem.

I have a lot of leftovers, from the birthday bash of Sunday - roast beef and Yorkshire pudding were the centrepiece. Lots of roast beef, no Yorkshire pudding left, a few roast potatoes and carrots, a small amount of a kind of cauliflower cheese and a lot of Jamie's Hustle Brussels, because frankly they weren't really very wonderful. I should have just stuck to the much despised English boiled brussels sprouts. I have used some of them already in my Cottage pie, and the cajun spice flavoured braised beef and veg served with rice - which sounds grander that what it was - throwing a whole lot of stuff into a frying pan and cooking it. However, I still have a lot left and I'm reluctant to just throw them out, although I could. Which is when I thought of that recipe.

I thought that Pizzoccheri - the name at the top of the page in my book - was the name of a particular pasta dish. But no it's the name of the pasta itself - a tagliatelle shaped pasta, that is made from buckwheat flour, and some wheat flour which prevents it falling apart. Well you will have to search for buckwheat pasta here, but you can get buckwheat flour and have a go at it yourself. I won't be doing that today, even though it's tempting because I really don't feel like going out again to get some buckwheat flour.

It comes from the small town of Teglio, in the Italian Alps, in the Valtellina region of Lombardy, just south of the Swiss border and a little to the east of the top of Lake Como. It's a mountainous area and not at all suited to growing wheat and so they grew buckwheat instead. The pasta is made in the same way as ordinary pasta, but with a 4:1 ratio of buckwheat to wheat flour. Well commercial pizzocchero is usually 3:1, and at the other extreme the official recipe from the Accademia del Pizzochero di Teglio specifies 95% buckwheat flour. If you can read Italian, then you can find this 'official' recipe on their website.

But back to the making of the pasta itself. It will crumble in a pasta machine and so it is generally made by hand, which probably dictates the shape, as it is rolled out by hand and then cut into strips. If you are interested in these things, you can watch A Pasta Grannies video in which they make the pasta as well as making the dish.

The people of northern Italy, are not restricted to this one use of buckwheat however:

"apart from pizzoccheri, buckwheat is also used in the Valtellina to make other traditional recipes such as type of spaghetti called fidelin, polenta (known as polenta taragna), gnocchi, chisciöi della Valtellina (a cheese filled pancake), sciatt (deep fried battered cheese balls) and various cakes, breads and breadsticks!" The Pasta Project

The Pasta Project website which is always informative about Italy's pasta dishes, has a picture of a dish -Pizzoccheri alla Valtellinese - that the author ate at a farm restaurant in the area - as shown here. It's not a particularly attractive looking dish is it, unless you have food stylists and top photographers as in my starting point version.

The other rather extraordinary thing about this dish is that if you look up pizzocchero - you will only find it used in one particular pasta dish - unlike just about all of the other hundreds of pasta shapes each of which are used in a multitude of different ways. And although I saw a few variations, there really aren't that many. It is a truly traditional dish, and I'm sure the locals all get hot under the collar if you do it wrong.

So what are the components of the dish? The pasta, some cabbage, potatoes, the local cheese, sinful amounts of butter and a lot of garlic. You chop the potatoes into cubes, cook them a bit, add the chopped cabbage, then the pasta, until done. In a separate pan you cook a lot - I mean a lot - of butter, with a lot of garlic. Then in a dish you layer, your pasta mix, cubes of the local cheese Valtellina Casera cheese, and pour over the sizzling, garlicky butter. Mix it all together and serve, or before mixing, bake it in the oven.

Herewith two examples - the first from La Cucina Italia and the second from Two Greedy Italians - i.e. Gennaro Contaldo and Antonio Carlucci in a video, who make a slightly more sophisticated version in that instead of the traditional savoy cabbage, they - well this is really Antonio Carlucci's recipe - use a mix of silverbeet, the savoy cabbage and cavolo nero (Tuscan kale).

So much for tradition. Because right at the beginning of my ramble around the net, I found a Guardian article from Yotam Ottolenghi who presents three different ways of serving pizzocheri, as well as how to make it. Without an extensive search I will say that he is the only person to do anything with this pasta which is not the traditional cabbage and potatoes. His first option was just to toss it with olive oil, herbs and cheese. His other two options were a very simple Pizzoccheri with burnt lemon butter and crisp sage and a more adventurous Pizzoccheri with miso cabbage and spiced breadcrumbs, which is, I suppose a play with the traditional recipe. Much lighter looking aren't they? Well for a start there is a smaller percentage of buckwheat flour in his pasta - 250g to 175g 00 flour.

And here I come full circle to my leftover problem. Basically shredded and braised Brussels sprouts. Obviously buckwheat pasta is out. But the Brussels sprouts can stand in for cabbage. Now do I include potatoes? I have some leftover roast potatoes - maybe I could dice them and fry them for a crunchy topping? Or should I go for Ottolenghi's breadcrumbs? Garlic yes. Huge amounts of burnt butter? No. I adore butter, but it really seems a step too far on the fat side of things for me. Cheese? Well I think I'll just stick to the usual grated Parmesan topping. I have to say that I am very tempted by the idea of bacon, or ham, or salami all of which go very well with cabbagey things. Or maybe even sausage.  I have a couple of frozen sausages. I don't think beef would be as good. Maybe - just for me - a topping of crispy chilli garlic oil. And to boost the vegetable factor - some shredded zucchini? I also have half a red capsicum but I think that's not quite right.

I shall think on it and report back.

YEARS GONE BY

July 3

2024 - A decor book

2023 - Bargain hunting dilemmas - it's class isnt't it?

2022 - Sundries

2021 - I didn't know that I was being mindful

2020 - Deleted

2019 - A quote

2018 - Salt as an essential ingredient

2017 - Nothing