Innehållsförteckning för October/November 2017 från SAVEUR

To the wider world of worthy noodles, we salute you! And promise to slurp and celebrate each of you in good time. Here, we are focused on pasta, the great pride and cultural export of Italy, its manifold variations and traditions, and the people who manufacture, cook, and tinker with and think about the stuff. Every issue of saveur is a labor of love, but this one has been especially laborious and fueled by crazy love and an infinitude of carbs. Because we love pasta so much. And there is so much of it. And the topic is as overdone as canned spaghetti, and there’s nothing new under the Tuscan sun, and how do you find anything novel to say about the most beloved, common, and universally domesticated food type…

TUNISIA Tunisians consume the third greatest amount of pasta per capita in the world (26 pounds per person according to the Union of Organizations of Manufacturers of Pasta Products in 2014). Just 96 miles from Sicily, the country has adopted its own variations on pasta—which is generally referred to as makarouna— including sauces flavored with harissa and tabil, a spice blend of garlic, chile, caraway, and coriander. SOMALIA Colonized by Italy in the 1880s, Somalia has long been acquainted with the European power’s cuisine. Called baasto in Somali, pasta appeared in Somalia during the Italian occupation. Suugo suqaar is an adaptation of Bolognese with cubed meat and xawaash, an aromatic mix of cumin, coriander, black pepper, turmeric, cardamom, and other spices. Federation, a combination of rice and pasta, is usually…

The 16 bar seats at the Chicago restaurant Monteverde offer a view of one of the slower-paced shows in town, even by avant-garde standards: The two female leads perform on a raised stage in silence, heads down, with faces that betray no emotion. The action is all in their hands. You sit, you watch, you don’t applaud, you may even stay for all six hours. Chicago holds its theater culture in high regard, and at Monteverde, from James Beard Award winner Sarah Grueneberg, the dinner and a show is a show that’s your dinner. Its pasta makers are showcased on a tabletop stage made from Boos Block walnut. Overhead, a 10-foot-long mirror is carefully tilted where the TVs would be in a sports bar. It provides a view of the…

Il Genovese In a humble trattoria in the center of Genoa, pesto master and ambassador Roberto Panizza serves his famous recipe every which way. ilgenovese.com Baccicin dü Carü This little cottage in the hills west of Genoa is known for its mortarand- pestle pesto served over gnocchi and tagliatelle with marjoram. osteriabaccicin.it Ö Magazín On a slice of Portofino’s harbor, the Mussini family serves homey, sophisticated food made from generations-old recipes, including pesto. Calata Marconi, 34 Da Laura Above the San Fruttuoso abbey, this tiny restaurant is known for its green lasagne and mussels marinara. Hike or take a ferry from nearby Portofino. San Giorgio Arguably one of the region’s best fine-dining options—with a view— San Giorgio serves pesto with homemade mandilli di seta. ristorante san giorgio.net FROM PINE NUT…

Two Pastas, Alike in Dignity Speaking extremely generally, it’s possible to say Italy has two distinct pasta cultures. In the north, they glorify pasta fresca, or fresh pasta. In central and southern Italy, machine-made pasta secca, dried pasta, is dominant. One is made by hand with egg and soft flour. The other is extruded from a dough of durum semolina and water. Neither is “better” than the other, any more than pappardelle al ragù is better than bucatini all’amatriciana. They are different foods with different uses, representing different traditions. But in America, especially in certain high-end restaurants, it can be difficult to escape the idea that eggy fresh pasta is the true pasta. The large-scale production of dried pasta has a longer history in Italy than tomato sauce. The first…

TASTES, TRADITIONS, AND PASTA INSPIRING US IN THE KITCHEN RIGHT NOW Li Chiusoni Galluresi (Sardinian Gnocchi) Habitat: Sardinia, especially the region of Arzachena Made from: Double-zero (00) flour, semola flour, hot water, salt How to: Roll pieces of dough into about ½-inch-thick strips, then cut the strips into 1½-inch nubs. Using your thumb or your index and middle fingers together, press down firmly on each piece while dragging it against the small holes of a cheese grater (the front or back side of the grater, depending on which way you like the indentations). Traditionally served with: Tomato sauce or ragù made with sausage, gamebirds, or wild boar Scorze di Nocella (Hazelnut Shells) Habitat: Puglia, particularly the city of Taranto Made from: Durum wheat flour and water Variations: Whole wheat, grano…

If I wanted a definitive account of the dish’s origins, I’d be disappointed, warned Piermassimo Cirio, the bespectacled, cheerful 48-yearold who manages the kitchen at Madonna della Neve, a restaurant in Piedmont’s white truffle– and wine-rich Langhe region. Pinkiefingertip- size agnolotti del plin (from “pinch” in the local dialect), filled with meat and vegetables and sealed with a simple squeeze of thumb and forefinger, are the restaurant’s signature, and while the pasta takes many forms, I never expected it to be drowned in vino. In 1952 Piermassimo’s parents, Renato and Francesca, purchased the restaurant, named for a small 16th-century chapel dedicated to “Our Lady of the Snow,” with which it shares a hilltop overlooking Val Bormida. Francesca, now 81, continues in the kitchen, and Renato, who grows wine grapes behind…

The north-central Italian town of Modena has produced Enzo Ferrari and Luciano Pavarotti, as well as some of the most iconic Ital ian foods, l ike balsamic vinegar, Bolognese, Parmigiano-Reggiano, and the classic stuffed pasta, tortellini. When it comes to making tortellini, a Modenese tradition dating to the 16th century, there is no room for improvisation. The dough must be rolled out to a precise thickness, divided evenly, and worked quickly or it will dry and crack. Proper folding requires practice and exacting movements. You wouldn’t think of this as child’s play. But the kids of the Tortellante project do. With the help of a group of volunteers, mostly grandmothers, aunts, and family friends, these special-needs teenagers and young adults are mastering the art of tortellini. The experimental after-school program…

America did not become the world’s second greatest pasta culture—a place where al dente is de facto, when agnolotti and casunziei are spoken on our menus—by chance or by some lucky miracle of groupthink gone right. It was a steady march of progress led by advocates and enthusiasts who turned pasta from a vilified immigrant food into a suburban weeknight staple, and then finally into something one with the nation itself: a prism of its bounty, a canvas for crea tivity, an authentically American food. It would be heretical not to salute the first waves of Italian moms who came here, looked at the United States’ larder, and found it wanting. They and their children were able to create a facsimile of their ancestral cuisine at a time when simply…

CHICKEN RIGGIES New York Bobby Hazelton created the iconic Upstate New York dish at the now-closed Clinton House in Clinton, New York. It’s chicken breast cooked with tomato and cream over rigatoni. But Hazelton only ever made it for staff and regulars. One of his cooks, Mike Schulz, left to run the Chesterfield in Utica in 1988 and was the first to put it on a menu. The rest is (contentious, small-town) history. TOASTED RAVIOLI Missouri The place: Mama Campisi’s on the Hill in St. Louis. The chef: a man who lives on in lore simply as Fritz. A patron ordered ravioli, a drunk Fritz mistook bubbling grease for boiling water, and the result was improbably delicious. CRAWFISH MONICA Louisiana In New Orleans, you can eat red gravy (tomato sauce…

I ’d always imagined learning to make tiny, perfect tortellini from an aging native of Bologna or mastering pillowy agnolotti through a long apprenticeship in an obscure Piedmontese village. But then I heard about Evan Funke and his pasta-centric restaurant on Abbot Kinney Boulevard in Venice, with its pristine, glassed-in pasta laboratory, his arsenal of authentic tools, and his fiercely traditional, monklike dedication to the art and culture of handmade pasta. Here, I realized, was the burly, bearded, mattarello-wielding, sfoglia-rolling filled-pasta-making mentor I was looking for. The mattarello is a massive, meter-long wooden pasta rolling pin typical of Emilia-Romagna. Funke got his in Bologna and within minutes of my arrival, he’s deployed it to transform a springy ball of spinach dough into a sfoglia, or pasta sheet, as even, smooth,…

Preserve fresh pasta like the Friulians I FIRST LEARNED ABOUT MLINCI, or griddled pasta sheets, from Marcella Hazan’s Marcella Says. In Friuli and neighboring Slovenia, where the cold and damp conditions made it difficult to dry and conserve pasta, toasting the sheets was a better way to make them last. Crisped in a dry skillet for 1–2 minutes on each side, the sheets take on little brown blisters. The dough often contains polenta in Friuli, which lends a toasty flavor reminiscent of fresh tortillas, but this technique can be applied to any fresh dough. The sheets are broken into pieces, boiled in salted water, and eaten like any other pasta. Hazan attributed her recipe to Joško Sirk, a chef from Friuli who makes them with an egg and cornmeal dough.…

In the beginning, there was pasta. Out of the void sprang a colossal tangle of it accompanied by two proportionately large, red-sauced meatballs. On its first day, soaring through nothingness, this supernatural spaghetti being resolved to split the water from the heavens. And after much flying and building stuff, it grew weary and created somewhere to rest: land and—why not?—a volcano that spat alcohol. Later, after the world’s first hangover, came seas, humans, and the rest of creation. And so, according to the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, our world was formed. This is the creation myth first expounded in 2005 by physics student Bobby Henderson, who argued in an open letter to the Kansas Board of Education that his religion based on pasta was every bit as scientifically…

The pastas served at New York’s Hearth begin as whole grains—berries of farro, blue durum, and red fife trucked in from Upstate. Those grains are milled into flour, made into dough, pressed into shape through a gleaming Arcobaleno extruder, and boiled fresh. Working on a batch of rigatoni, chef Marco Canora rattled off the proportions of the dough: this much durum, that much farro. But, he adds, “There’s no recipe for something like this. Sometimes the wheat comes in a little drier than others. It’s all about feel.” After 10 years of running the Tuscan-inspired East Village restaurant, Canora had become the poster child for chef burnout— late nights, weight gain, open-kitchen shouting matches, gout. Knowing he needed to make a change, he reinvented himself as the world’s unlikeliest wellness…

JOSH MCFADDEN Ava Gene’s, Portland, Oregon Josh McFadden attended culinary school and cooked in Michelin-starred palazzos in Rome, but “somewhere along the line,” he says, “I realized I wanted to be more in touch with seasonal ingredients in a simpler way.” That led McFadden to cook in neighborhoody spots like recently shuttered Franny’s in Brooklyn and, later, Lupa, under Mark Ladner. “He is a genius,” McFadden says. “That’s where I really learned about pasta.” Today in Portland, McFadden follows the seasons and sticks to tradition. “Americans, without a long history— we feel we can put our own stamp on certain dishes,” he says, “and that can often go horribly wrong.” So he keeps it simple—pasta pomodoro, cacio e pepe, linguine with clams—and stays in sync with the seasons. BRUCE LOGUE…

The pesto is perfect in its imperfection. A fine, juicy silt of gold and green suspended in oil. The basil tastes alive, as if still reaching toward the sun. “IF YOU are in Pra’ and you don’t grow basil, you are nobody,” declares the basil farmer Roggerio Rossi. The sky above his sprawling greenhouses is gray, the air heavy, a climatic state called macaja in the Genoese dialect. Inside, the atmosphere is static, still, electric green. The scent is peppery, briny, more delicate than freshly clipped grass, but intoxicating and pungent. A carpet of Basilico Genovese runs full-bleed from wall to wall. It’s fluffy— almost awake—and appears to be reaching up, exploding with small, teardrop-shaped leaves. Five workers recline on their sides across wooden planks suspended over the fragrant flora.…

1 ROLL YOUR OWN Funke swears that hand-rolling sfoglie with a mattarello is the secret that differentiates dense, flat-tasting pastas from fluffy, tender ones. “Fuck your pasta machine” is his hashtag and life mantra, but he says it’s not just braggadocio: “If you lovingly create a ball of light dough and smash it between a pasta machine’s metal rollers, you’re crushing everything in it and essentially degassing it. But if you take that ball and use the mattarello, you spread out the air pockets, creating a lighter waferlike dough.” Roll the sheet of dough firmly at first, then more and more gently as you get a larger, thinner sfoglia. And remember to rotate it often, making sure it never sticks to your board. (For more sfoglia technique, see pg. 99.)…

Farina di grano arso, or “burned wheat flour,” originally referred to the flour made from scorched wheat scavenged from burned fields in Puglia. It’s believed that after harvest, farmers set fire to the remains of the wheat crop to help fertilize the soil and control weeds and pests. Poor farm workers and neighbors were allowed to pick up any toasted bits left behind, which they ground into flour for pastas and breads. While the fields are no longer burned today, the taste for the dark, smoky flour remains and producers in Puglia and around Italy now make industrialized grano arso flour and dried pastas from husked, deeply toasted grains. The dough is delicate and slightly brittle, similar to Japanese soba noodles in texture and color, and it’s most often used…

MORNING IN GARDONE RIVIERA IS A RIOT OF TIDY perfection. Songbirds coo contentedly. Wild sun ricochets off the postcard lake. Spiffy wooden boats dawdle under a cloudless sky. The air tastes delicious. Riccardo Camanini sits on the terrace of his lakeside restaurant, Lido 84, nursing an espresso and talking about his spaghettoni with butter and brewer’s yeast. Spaghettoni is spaghetti’s fat cousin. Camanini gets his from a 120-year-old pastificio called Verrigni, in Abruzzo, 300 miles to the south. They use only Italian-grown wheat and extrude the spaghettoni through dies made of gold rather than industry-standard bronze for reasons that are a little too complex to get into here. When the pasta is nearly done ( judged by sight and taste and pushed a little past al dente), Camanini tosses it…