La Minestra

La Cucina Povera- The Food of the Poor. It was about to be a huge fad, and then people realized they didn’t want to pay ten bucks for bread soup. Surprise.

I’m making soup. I’m making Minestra di Pasta e Fagioli. This is a soup often known in the US as “Pasta Fazool,” because of the Neapolitan word for bean: fazzulo. Whatever you call it, soup, pasta and beans are cooked together and separately throughout Italy in many preparations. There are many renditions of this soup in American restaurants and they largely suck, frankly, because they take a french or franco-american approach to an intrinsically Italian soup. They take beans and boil them with chicken stock, add a can of tomatoes and a bag of frozen vegetables. It’s a simmer-and-stir. Many delicate french soups are made this way (minus the frozen vegetables) and it’s a perfectly fine technique- but not for Italian soups.

Italian soups have 2 components  that will set them apart: pestata and pandade. Like everything in Italian, there are many different words that mean the same thing, but here’s what they mean: Pestata (or trito or mirpazza) is a paste of aromatic vegetables and fat- usually pork fat like back fat or salt pork, but could also be lard or olive oil. Garlic, onions, carrots, celery, parsely, rosemary- whatever is appropriate to the recipe (or your mood) are chopped together until very fine, and then the fat is added and chopped in as well (or you can do what I do- use a food processor). This is one of the traditional uses of the mezzaluna you got for christmas five years ago and lost in the back of the pantry. The paste is then fried separately and added to the soup once it’s lightly toasted.

Then there is the panade (or rinforzo) or thickener. In many recipes with beans, which have a natural affinity for them, potatoes are cooked along with the legumes until they’re cooked enough to be mashed, either in the soup pot, or taken out and mashed to a finer consistency and added back in. Bread can act in this role as well, and grains like semolina. Rice is generally not used in this way, since its consistency, like pasta’s, is considered sacred and is added only at the last moment to cook to its optimum point. The point is, unlike a roux or cornstarch, these add body and flavor, not merely viscosity.

And in the spirit of soup’s economy, after dinner which included a potato and radicchio salad, there was a little left, and into the soup that went as well.

I could hear my grandmother calling me a greaseball.

Welcome back.

We are back, and as you can see, we’ve done some remodeling. I can even post photos, look:

P, Secret Agent Gnocchi and Myself

And what’s more, you’ll see your comments more quickly, since I don’t have to wade through comment spam for 30 minutes every time I log in, thanks to Akismet, and other snazzy devices that I may or may not completely understand. The search feature works, the blog looks nicer and we now have the ability to post video and audio — the podcast lives! The blog is also easier for me to use, not that you care, but it means I’ll be able to upload more- and more interesting- content more regularly.

A few ghosts still haunt us:

Link and text formatting on old (2009 and earlier) entries

The old blog was entered in something called markdown syntax. This was a very fast and superior alternative to the text editor in drupal (the old content management system). Unfortunately, now that we’re in WordPress, if we load markdown, we disable other features that we really want to use, so for the time being, old posts are going to look strange and hyperlinks won’t work (although you can see the web address, you’ll just have to copy and paste it). Secret Agent Gnocchi and the Gnomes are working on this, but if this problem is going to be permanent, I will update the text in the more often-visited posts.

WordPress has human-readable URLs

When I post an entry or a photograph, it becomes an entry in a database. Drupal would just number them as they were created, so if you looked in the address bar, it might look like this: http://omnivorousfish.com/node/199. WordPress, however, takes the node’s title into consideration, and the same article’s URL becomes: http://omnivorousfish.com/gnocchi-the-finer-points/. Why do you care? Well, unless you link to or have bookmarks of any specific posts (not just omnivorousfish.com) you don’t care. If you are linked to me and I know about it, I will email you the correct links when I get around to it. If you’re looking for something you had bookmarked, the Search feature actually works now.

Comments prior to July 2009 are gone for the time being.

Yeah, we have no idea WTF happened on this one. They just disappeared. This really stinks, because a lot of the pasta posts had great dialogue in them, not to mention the fact that a lot of blogging luminaries showed up over the years to grace my little site with a comment, and now those comments are gone…and those people may not come back. I’m hoping they’re in an Uh-Huh video somewhere, and will come back in shaky pencil animation.

Older Photos are too wide for the new page format.

Again, this is a migration bug, and really a very minor one. If there’s a photo at the top of an old post, it impinges on the right block. No biggie.

Other than that, we are back on board with a new look and a new commitment to the slaughter of sacred cows in the food world. If you have any questions, please email us at make pasta at gmail dot com.

Pumpkin Raviol

Jesus H Tapdancing Christ, I love apple cider. Apple cider, Benjamin Franklin is often quoted as saying, is proof that God loves us, and wants us to be happy. Ok, that’s beer, but really, I think I like hard cider better than beer anyhow. There is six pounds of swiss chard and four of lacinato kale in the fridge going bad because I have been working my nads off in the world of home improvement, and next week will be equally daunting in the interminable and often disappointing world of work.

But that’s ok, the pumpkin ravioli are ready, there are 5 dozen in the freezer. I didn’t take any pictures, like a dumbass, but I’ll walk you through the basics. Special thanks to Billy for making the rest of the ravioli while I cleaned up the kitchen.

The dough: Pasta is predicated on the formula of one egg, or 1/4 cup of water, per 1/2-2/3 cup of flour. Most people add salt, and some olive oil, although what oil contributes I have never been able to ascertain. Water can be a matter of economy- although that economy can become tradition- or a matter of gluten development. Ravioli like a stronger dough, unreachable when using high-protein eggs as a liquid source. I have seen ravioli made only with water, a tricky proposition, since, unlike bread dough, there are no yeast and rising forgiving anything left behind in the initial mixing. Want to know the truth? It’s a matter of taste. I think the egg pasta matches the richness of the pumpkin filling, so I use all eggs for this particular recipe. I have also seen ravioli made with dough whose only liquid was **yolks**. Once you have a little practice, you can make whatever you want. Starting with a mixture of eggs and water is probably a good idea. For 6 dozen ravioli, let’s say 4 cups (20 oz) flour, 4 eggs, ½ cup water and 1 teaspoon salt. Let me caution you here, again, not to add all the flour at once. Hold back ½-3/4 cup, it is much easier to knead in flour than to add water. If you’re making it by hand, which I recommend for your first five or six times, start with the flour in a mound (in a bowl, if you’re skittish) and make a deep indentation or “well” in the top. In small bowl, beat the eggs, salt and water together and pour into the well. With a fork or your fingers, stir in flour from the walls of the well, making a thicker and thicker paste until all the flour is incorporated. When dough is a more or less a cohesive mass, it should be dry to the touch. If it feels very wet, continue to knead in the remaining flour as needed. Knead until the dough becomes smooth, homogenous and elastic, about 10 or 15 minutes. Wrap in plastic and rest for at least thirty minutes in the fridge, until an indention in the dough doesn’t bounce back.

The filling: Anything used to fill pasta should be drained. I don’t care if you’re using peanut butter, there’s water in there you don’t need. Pumpkin is bad, but other squashes are even worse. I already gave you the recipe.

The technique: Cut your dough into 6 equal pieces; use a scale if you’re paranoid. Work with one piece at a time, keeping the others covered with a plastic wrap or towels. This is a great application for a pasta machine, where you’ll want to end up with a 5” x 30” rectangle. If you’re doing it by hand, use twice as much dough to make a 10×30 rectangle, and cut it in half to follow these directions. This piece of dough is going to make 12 ravioli, so scoop packed tablespoonfuls of filling 2-1/2 inches apart along the long side of the dough, 1” from the edge. Brush the surface of dough not covered by filling (including in between) LIGHTLY with water and fold the dough in half over itself, so you end up with 12 still-connected ravioli in a row. Press down along folded edge, up to the filling; then press in between ravioli. Finally, push any air out of the ravioli through the last open seam, then seal that seam. Cut the ravioli apart with a round cutter, pastry wheel or, my grandmother’s fave, a juice glass. Usually I do them square because I like the extra pasta while I’m eating them. Also, they’re faster and generate less waste than round varieties (though you can salvage enough waste for a small serving of fettucine when you’re done).

Now comes the fun part: the first time you do this, they’re going to stick to the table, no matter how much flour you’ve put on them. Loosen them with something THIN and METAL, like a bench scraper, icing spatula or even a butter knife. You could also work a piece of dental floss underneath them, but be careful not to tear them.

Obviously, this all assumes you’ve worked with pasta dough before, or at least some kind of dough. Don’t be skittish with the flour your first time. You can freeze them flat on cookie sheets lined with floured towels, once they’re solid you can put them in bags.

Listening: Watching a Law & Order rerun