Pasta Without Eggs, 3 Ways: Make This Hidden Treasure Puglia-Style Classic at Home
By Elizabeth Luard
The little hilltop town of Ostuni, in Puglia, the heel of Italy's boot, overlooks the Adriatic Sea midway between Bari and Brindisi. Completed in 312 BCE, it's the last outpost of the Appian Way, which once joined the southern provinces to Rome.
Puglia is known for the excellence of its bread (the artisan durum-wheat bread of Altamura, in particular), the venerability of its olive trees and the quantity rather than the quality of its wines. Tourism in the region is mostly from within Italy itself. The sophisticates of Milan and Rome know a good thing when they find it and like to keep it to themselves.
Related: Check out the wines of southeastern Italy's Puglia region too.
You'll find plenty of good restaurants, some which might be ranked as great, but home cooking is the standard by which excellence is judged, a culinary tradition maintained through the absolute conviction that no one cooks like your mama cooks -- and if anyone says otherwise, they're wrong.
Related: Check out the rustic, lusty Sicilian pasta dish with a slightly naughty name.
Here, a woman called simply Mimmi learned her kitchen skills from her grandmother since her mother worked outside the home and had little interest in anything domestic. But then, she adds, it's not unusual for family traditions to skip a generation, which is why she makes it her business to hand on her skills to those who cannot otherwise come by the knowledge.
Pasta and bread, the staple foods of the region, are made with hard durum wheat flour, semola di grano duro. The flour (harder even than double-zero) is pale gold in color, dry and a little chalky when rubbed between the fingers, and, when made into a dough, tastes of sunshine.
Related: Try another Puglia classic - mussels.
Meat is eaten sparingly, with horsemeat traditional in the region -- possibly because milk animals were far too valuable to be sent to slaughter without good reason. For the daily dinner, both coastal-dwellers and inlanders rely on vegetables and legumes, particularly the fava. You'll find handfuls of fresh favas on the table in April and early May, along with fresh peas, to be eaten raw as a dessert before the first strawberries appear.
In short, the basic Puglian culinary habit is cucina povere -- poor-man's cooking -- and thus perfectly suited to our fiscally-challenged times. This includes a simple pasta recipe that doesn't even call for eggs.
Related: Eat thrifty the Italian way.
The simplicity of this recipe makes it great for home cooks to experiment with. Try your hand at making a trio of classic pasta shapes.
Three eggless pastas shaped by hand
The recipes and techniques for these Ostuni pastas come courtesy of Mimma.
Mimma's Basic Dough
Serves about 20
Ingredients
Approximately 3.3 pounds hard durum wheat-flour (semola di grano duro)
Approximately 3 cups water
Directions
1. Make a mound of the flour on a large board or clean countertop, then slowly knead the water into the flour, first with your fingers, then with your palm directly onto the table. Once the dough is formed, work it with the heel and palm of both your hands till perfectly smooth. It's not necessary for the dough to rest before shaping into pasta.
For orechiette: Cut off a thick slice of the dough, roll it into a rope as thick as your finger, then chop off a finger's width. Pushing the dough cube against the near-side of a blunt knife blade, hold it on the other side with the tip of your index finger. Now pull the knife toward you on a gentle slope to make a saucer-shape, roll the shape over onto your thumb to expose the underside and flip it into a little hat on the smooth side, leaving the rough side uppermost. To cook, drop into lots of boiling salted water, wait until it comes back to a boil, then drain. This shape is good with cime de rape stufato, broccoli rabe or mustard-greens cooked in its own juices with olive oil, an anchovy or two, garlic and pepperonicini. Or serve with a sugo (tomato sauce with oil and garlic) and very small meatballs made with or without meat (meatless is traditional in the region).
For cavatelli: Proceed as for orchiette, but this time, push the dough cube away from you with knife sloped in same way, but don't use the index finger to hold it back. Good with chickpeas cooked till tender with the juices emulsified with olive oil and served juicy rather than dry (such dishes are known as dry soups, sopa seca).
For cicatelli: Roll the slice of dough into a thinner rope -- just a bit thinner than your little finger, then cut into short lengths, mark with three fingers and pull to roll into an open-topped cylinder (sausage-shape). Serve this all'arrabbiata or with a simple tomato sauce.
Elisabeth Luard is a British food-writer, journalist and broadcaster specializing in the traditional cooking of Europe and Latin America placed in its social, geographical and historical context.
Also fresh on Zester Daily:
Hungry for great Indian food? You can make your own rice-lentil crepes with potato filling.
What French dish changed Chef Charlie Palmer's life?
What does farm-to-table even mean?
Did Rudy Kurniawan, accused of wine fraud, play wealthy wine collectors for fools?
Which global brand of bottled tea can trace its origins to a thirsty runner?
