This year for Valentine's Day, a day when we are excited to stay home away from the hordes of diners in restaurants, fresh pasta was calling to us.
When I was a young man, in my early 20s in the early 1980s, fresh egg pasta was all the rage in America. You could not claim to be a cook if you did not make fresh pasta. In those formative years, I made scads of pasta, tagliatelle and pappardelle mainly, primarily unflavored but at times with tomato paste, spinach, squid ink, saffron, and you name it.
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| Happy Valentine's Day to Us! |
As awareness of real Italian food grew, the food cognoscenti, today called foodies, came to understand Italian cuisine as something other than practiced at red sauce joints of the type that Tony Shaloub lamented in "The Big Night." Or to quote Tucci in response to a request for spaghetti and meatballs on the same plate, "sometimes the spaghetti likes to be alone." We came to learn about antipasti, primi, and secondi and so many other things.
Demand and awareness drew more imports of good quality Italian box pasta about the same time as I was commuting three hours a day to and from DC and had two babies to feed when I got home. Dried pasta was a godsend for a quick and largely stress-free meal. I switched from fresh to dried for the longest time, decades really, loving the bronze die pastas from Gragnano.
Now that I am in my 60s, the pendulum has swung back to fresh pasta, no doubt influenced by travel to Italy and the availability in retirement of time to devote to making pasta. Early in my life, fresh pasta was synonymous with northern egg pasta. Now, I am concentrating on southern pastas of semolina remacinata and water, with no eggs. I have a goal to make my fingers speak orecchiette fluently.
For our Valentine's Day pasta, Ann chose corzetti, a classic and ancient disk-shaped pasta from Liguria (also home to trofie). Making corzetti is a two-step process. First, you cut rounds from a sheet of pasta. Then, using a wooden stamp, you press a design into both sides of the pasta. The designs vary, but were often carved representations of the family crest. Our corzetti mold is rather simpler, a cheap mold with a star on one side and a spiral on the other.
Corzetti are not a shape that I have ever seen on a restaurant menu, though I suppose they might be found in restaurants in Liguria, a province that I have not visited. The only way for us to experience them is to make our own, which we set out to do after opening a bottle of nice Champagne with which to toast ourselves.
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| Here's to Us! |
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Les Frères Mignon L'Aventure Premier Cru
Crisp Extra Brut Blanc des Blancs Champagne |
The Champagne opened, Ann set about scaling out the flour for the corzetti dough while I whipped up a quick batch of artichoke pesto to serve on bruschette for an antipasto. Ordinarily, I do not serve artichokes or artichoke heavy dishes with wine; artichokes can wreck many wines. A safe bet is always a really crisp unoaked white and the Champagne held its own.
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| Scaling Flour for the Dough |
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| Assembling Bruschette |
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| Artichoke Pesto Bruschette |
Artichoke pesto is a no-brainer, dead simple antipasto that takes seconds to make in a food processor when made with canned artichoke hearts. It is best made and eaten right away, though it will store for a few days in the cooler. If I were using fresh or frozen artichoke hearts, I would add lemon juice to keep the pesto from turning brown. Canned artichokes always contain citric acid, so adding an additional anti-oxidant is not necessary. I do not add much olive oil or cheese; I want this to be fresh and less caloric.
1 can (400g) artichoke hearts, drained
leaves from 3-4 sprigs fresh basil
1 ounce (30g) raw pine nuts
2 cloves garlic, finely minced
pinch of Kosher salt
grated pecorino, enough to sit in palm of hand
drizzle of extra virgin olive oil
Put all the ingredients except the olive oil in the food processor and blend to a smooth paste. Drizzle in olive oil until the pesto takes on the consistency you want. I wanted this batch to be a drier paste rather than a smoother sauce. Season to taste.
Ann continued on with putting together the dough as I was assembling the bruschette. Corzetti dough can contain eggs or not, depending on how your great grandmother made it. We followed a recipe from a Ligurian woman who uses 00 flour, eggs, and white wine. I took over kneading the dough for its final ten minutes, after which, I put it to rest on the counter under a towel. While waiting for the dough to rest, we sat at the counter and enjoyed our wine and bruschette.
After appetizers, I rolled the pasta into a fairly thick sfoglia and we tag-teamed cutting and stamping the corzetti.
A traditional sauce is olive oil, marjoram (maggiorana), garlic, and pine nuts. Some use walnuts instead. For our part, neither of us are big fans of marjoram, but we love sage (salvia). In fact, the very first meal Ann ever cooked for me so very long ago was a pasta in sage browned butter.
Our sauce I made quickly by heating olive oil and adding chopped fresh sage until it crisped. Then I added a handful of pine nuts and two large cloves of minced garlic. Both those additions browned in seconds after which I transferred the sauce to a cold steel bowl to keep it from cooking further. Moments later, I added the cooked pasta and tossed it.
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| Cooking Sage in Olive Oil |
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| Sauce Ready: Sage, Pine Nuts, and Garlic in Olive Oil |
Corzetti, like many pastas, come with a built-in timer. As they cook, they float, just like gnocchi. These floated in about two minutes, but wanted just another scant minute longer in the boiling water for a grand total of three minutes of cook time.
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| Cooked Corzetti Floating |
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| Corzetti with Sage, Pine Nuts, and Garlic |
Making corzetti with Ann was a lot of fun. Her take is that they are too labor intensive, but as an ex-restaurant chef, I do not mind putting in the work.
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