Maltagliati al Forno ai Funghi Porcini Secchi

Not only have the Italians given us pasta fresca, they've also given us a way to maintain our dignity (or at least some authenticity) when we screw it up. I made fresh pappardelle for M and her friend the other night. Since I was making fresh pasta, I went ahead and made extra to freeze against some late and hungry arrival home. Saturday evening was that late and hungry arrival, when we came home from a night in the Berkshires scoping out wedding venues.

I remembered the pappardelle in the freezer, and as is usual, started constructing a dinner menu in my head based on what I suspected was in the fridge and pantry. What I hadn't counted on, though was my idiocy in storing the pasta. I knew that it was the usual thing, after cutting up the pasta, to flour it before freezing, but I was eager to sit down with our guest on the night that I made it, so I just tossed it in a bag and the bag in the freezer. It was a big lump of wide noodles. I tried to peel them off one by one, but they just came apart. So I changed my approach. I had already been soaking some dried porcini mushrooms for the sauce, so I just took that broth, strained it through two layers of cheesecloth, threw in a porcini-flavored stock cube, and some cream and boiled it up, then thickened with Wondra flour, readding the rinsed chopped porcinis at the end with a generous grinding of black pepper.

In the meantime, I broke and picked apart the frozen fresh noodles into whatever shapes I could. As long as they were a single layer, they were fine. I boiled them up in salted water, then put them into a Pyrex baking dish that, in retrospect, I should've greased. I threw in the porcini bechamel I'd made and stirred it up, topping with a generous amount of finely grated Parmigiano Reggiano. Baked at 400 for 15 minutes or so and we were done.

Maltagliati al Forno ai Funghi Porcini Secchi. It made for awesome leftovers. M called it "noodle kugel but with mushrooms and not sweet"... Hmph.

Anyway, maltagliati means, basically "badly cut" in Italian. The term should usually be reserved for remnants, say from making panzerotti or some other round stuffed pasta, that are cut into soups, but repurposing the term for badly frozen pappardelle sits well with me.

In other news, tapioca pudding has proven to be beyond my culinary capabilities. I tried two recipes with Brazilian pearl tapioca from Kalyustan, the spice shop in Manhattan, and just can't get it to thicken right. Forget it. I'm going back to rice pudding.

Pasta Fresca!

I ordered a couple dozen pears from Harry & David to be delivered to M's folks place on Cape Cod for Christmas. They arrived too early, so I called and complained. They promised another batch to arrive closer to Christmas. No charge. Now, I never thought fifty pears was what I wanted for Xmas, but it's what I got. Or at least what the whole family got. They were awesome. So awesome, in fact, that I regret not saving one, the reasons for which become apparent below.

M got me a pasta roller attachment for her Kitchenaid mixer. They're traditionally sold with two noodle cutters, one narrow, one wide, but I told her not to bother with these. If I'm going to the trouble of making pasta fresca, it's gonna be a something stuffed, and if it's not stuffed, I prefer hand-cut tagliatelli and papparedelle to uniform noodles. So why clutter the kitchen. I went through a couple of cookbooks and my recollections of various meals in and out of Italy and came up with a must-try list.

• pappardelle con tartufata - With the Italian truffle spread, butter and cheese. If this were made just with truffles, many would say to omit the cheese. I say go make your own pasta to leave the cheese off. Jacques Pepin tells a great story where he and his wife ask for cheese on a fish pasta dish in a restaurant. The waiter corrects them, saying it's not done, but they insist. He informs the chef who storms out asking who dares sully his creation with inappropriate cheese. The chef takes one look at Pepin, gulps, says it's no problem and retreats to the kitchen. I like the taste of truffles and cheese. And besides, tartufata is mostly mushrooms.
  
• "pepperdelle" con olio, pomodoro, e pecorino - Ever since I made the bagel pappa di pomodoro, I've thought the combination of pecorino, black pepper, and tomato was a lovely balance, particularly with a silky or oily texture to back it up. I've found a recipe for black pepper pasta. Once I get a little experience under the old belt, I'm going to attempt this, probably with big sheets of hard, salty pecorino shaved over the top.
  
• fagottini con pere e formaggio - little bundles stuffed with ricotta and a chunk of ripe pear, served with a cooked radicchio cream sauce. These were the original dish (with a slightly humorous name in English, though "fagot" in English means bundle) that made me fall in love with Osteria del Ponte. I imagine the difficulty here is in keeping the bundles closed when you boil them.
  
• ravioli di zucca - Years ago, I had squash ravioli at Barolo, a restaurant in Denver. Three big, floppy, irregular trapezoids of pasta, stuffed with a very thin layer of sweet, spicy squash--it barely accounted for half of the entire thickness of the ravioli, and melded perfectly with the browned sage butter it was served in. I had this long before I ever got acquainted with real Italian cooking and I could sense even then that this was something true. This is the one bow to familiar dishes I'll probably make with fresh pasta. Because when you cook the familiar, your dish falls into a continuum between the best and the worst your guests have ever had. Hopefully, you can be on the top end of the scale. You'll rarely be the best, so why even compete in the "spinach-ricotta ravioli" division? Why not do something new?
  
• maltagliati - The name means 'badly cut'. This is, I guess, what you cook up for the kids with the leftovers from making the mezzelune for the guests. Basically, it's irregularly cut noodles. Bits and pieces. Pastasciutta (dry pasta) is the essence of industrial food: mass-produced, totally uniform. (Too bad other industrialized food hasn't maintained the same purity.) I think was I was latching onto with those irregular ravioli was the fact that they'd obviously been created by a human, not a machine. Don't get me wrong. I love dry pasta for its infinite combinations, but the same impulse that made me shy away from the uniform noodle cutter attachments makes maltagliati attractive.
• lasagne in brodo - I had this in Lubriano, cooked by my friend Vivian. It's truly an amazing recipe, somewhere between soup and layered pasta, with meatballs and sliced hard-boiled egg! Labor-intensive, for sure, but impressive. Could even make it more special with the addition of a peeled soft-boiled egg on top too enrich the broth.
  
• casoncelli alla bergamasca - These are gyoza-shaped, stuffed with braised beef or veal, raisins, and crushed amaretto cookies, sauced with sage butter and pancetta. Had these at Osteria del Ponte in Italy, but didn't know the ingredients. If I'd known them, I probably would've enjoyed the dish more. As it was, I didn't really like it as much as the others.

This is sort of getting at the heart of stuffed pasta's appeal. It's what Michael Pollan in the Omnivore's Dilemma calls "good to think." The book is incredible, by the way, and highly recommended. He uses "good to think" as the pair of "good to eat" mostly to indicate that you feel good about the provenance of the food you are eating (e.g., that the cow was humanely slaughtered, or that the vegetables weren't trucked in from California). Stuffed pasta is often "good to think" as well. Usually, it's not much to look at, and the fillings are almost necessarily a fine paste of various indistinguishable ingredients, none of which can be too strongly flavored for fear of overwhelming everything else, including the pasta and whatever sauce it comes with. But at the same time, there's so little of the stuffing that you really can't put any great number of things in there or they're all going to disappear. So you almost have to bank on the diner's knowledge of what's in the pasta to heighten their enjoyment, because it's unlikely that they'll be able to pick out more than a couple ingredients, and if they do, it probably won't be a pleasant sensation.

I've found a few other stuffed pasta terms, but they seem to fall into a few groups (limiting myself here to those that are stuffed and boiled):

• crimped - Ravioli, lunette, and ravioloni. These are two separate sheets filled and sealed together. Suited to industrial production.
  
• folded - Mezzelune, casoncelli, and quadrucci. This is a single piece folded over and sealed.
  
• origami - tortellini, agnolotti, and tortelloni. In the tortelli family, the piece is square, and it folds over to a triangle, two points of which are folded together. This makes sense as there would not be any maltagliati left over with cutting square sheets.
• bundled - Fagottini and perline. These are pieces with a dollop of filling around which the pasta is gathered. I'm still unclear on how these don't end up coming undone in the water. There might be considerable trial and error here.

That last point also brings up the fact that the best and easiest probable use for pasta fresca is in lasagne. Multi-layered lasagne with a light topping is a real treat, with no boiling needed, no chance of explosion, and a heavy satisfaction factor.

Phew! I never suspected when I sat down to list some of my pasta fresca ambitions that this would turn into a meditation on what it is, but I suppose I should always be prepared for that. If anyone has any ideas about other stuffed or fresh pasta I should try, let me know.

Spaghetti Collins

Digging through an old Saveur, I picked up a recipe for Spaghetti Collins. Collins was my maternal grandma's maiden name, so it caught my eye. It's basically

2 cloves garlic,
6 bunches scallions sauteed in olive oil,
deglased with white wine, which is then reduced,
enriched with veal stock and
mounted with a half-stick of butter.

This is tossed with a pound of cooked spaghetti.

Apparently the provenance is New Orleans, which explains its richness.

I'd like to try it, though.

Last night, I semi-replicated the dish Dan S. made for us in Italy. He had the benefit of Italian zucchini and fresh made fusilli. I used the Braun cordless kettle I am currently in love with. The automatic kettle is as good as those instant 190 degree water thingies people put on their sink. Actually, since those dispensers only hold about 3 cups of water at a time, I'd prefer the kettle, which holds 7 cups. It boils very quickly and shuts off automatically. I bought it for tea and manual drip coffee, but use it for cooking nearly every time I turn on the stove. It works especially well for pasta on a weeknight.

I fill up the kettle and set it to boil. Into the large pasta pot, I put about an inch of water and a tablespoon of salt, then set it over high heat. Then I go about making or heating the sauce. When the kettle boils, I open the top flap so it can be dumped out quickly. (Otherwise, I have to hold the upturned kettle over a steaming pot for too long.) Dump the water in the pot and it's usually at a rolling boil immediately. Set the timer (for 1-2 min short of recommended cooking time), throw in the pasta, and bingo bango, al dente perfection. For long noodles which need to be submerged more, or for pasta for more than two people, two batches of boiling water are sometimes necessary, but it's still much faster than boiling it on the stove (and wastes a lot less energy since the water is heated directly).

Orecchiette con zucchini
1/2 lb. orecchiete pasta
2 zucchini, grated on large holes of box grater
1 clove garlic, run through garlic press
2 tbsp butter
1 tbsp olive oil
salt & pepper
Parmigiano Reggiano

1.) Place water on to boil (or use kettle method above).
2.) In a medium saucepan, saute the garlic in oil over medium heat, browning very slightly. Add zucchini, season generously with salt and pepper and cook, stirring occasionally, until softened. (The salt should help the zuchs release a lot of their moisture.)
3.) Cook pasta according to package directions, reserving a half cup of the pasta water. Drain pasta. Do not rinse or shake. Add pasta to zucchini, add the butter and some of the pasta water according to taste, and stir until well combined. Top with Parm and serve immediately.

Serves 2

Another of my recent favorite tricks is warming up the pasta bowls with the pasta water. If my mom were watching, I'd use a ladle to put some of the boiling water into each bowl to heat it up a little and make sure the ceramic doesn't cool down the pasta too much, but when it's just me or me and my girlfriend, near the end of the pasta cooking time, I'll just dip the bowl into the pasta water and scoop out some water. This is also nice because it sets aside pasta water for combining with the finished product in the saucepan, whatever sauce you're using.