Italian

Potato flour (not potato starch) makes pasta with a delicious and distinctly potato-ey flavor. The dough will feel stiff when just mixed, but after resting it gets soft and easy to roll and cut.

Italians enjoy many traditional foods made with farina di castagne—chestnut flour—especially cakes and sweets. Pasta with part chestnut flour is delicious too, as I hope you will discover. Imported farina di castagne is widely available in specialty markets (and from Web sites).

Flour from dried ceci—the Italian name for garbanzo beans or chickpeas—is one of a number of bean flours with which one can make pasta. Like the others, this yields a good pasta with a different nuance of flavor—complex, buttery, with a tinge of sweetness from the bean. It’s a great carrier for vegetable, game, or nut sauces.

This is one of the oldest pastas in Italy. The Romans would call it lasagnum—wide strips of pasta dressed with honey, cheese, and herbs. I love this pasta. When cooked, it is light and has a silky texture.

For this pasta use instant polenta flour. The cornmeal gives the pasta great texture, flavor, and color.

If you are at all interested in eating healthfully from “whole foods,” you have probably learned about flaxseed, hailed as a great source of fiber, beneficial fatty acids, and other good stuff. But did you know that it makes a really tasty fresh pasta too? Note that you need ground flaxseed meal—available in whole-food markets—for this dough.

Semolina is the grind of durum wheat—the wheat that makes the best dry pasta. Here, mixed one-to-one with all-purpose flour, it makes a fresh pasta that is nutty and resilient to the bite.

I love buckwheat for the earthy, gritty character it brings to many dishes. Flour made from the buckwheat seed (it’s not a relative of wheat) is used in Japanese soba noodles and is traditional in Italian pasta too. In the Valtellina they make a dish called pizzoccheri, buckwheat pappardelle dressed with cabbage and bacon and Fontina.

Some of the first pastas in Italy, made by the Etruscans and later the Romans, were made out of barley and chickpea flour. When wheat came on the scene, it was milled as whole wheat and used for pasta. We find 100-percent whole wheat a bit dense and hard to digest these days, so I use equal proportions of white and whole wheat here to make a light, fast-cooking pasta with a distinctive taste.

This versatile soup base is not really a broth, in the way my turkey broth is—that is, a clear liquid strained of all the ingredients that gave it flavor. In truth, the base starts cooking with several pounds of potatoes, carrots, and celery, and they stay in there. Yet, remarkably, it ends up light, clear, and clean-tasting, like a broth. To enjoy the clarity and consistency of the base, often I’ll add nothing more than rice, for texture and flavor. Onion and poached garlic make a flavorful yet light cream soup. On the other hand, I might fill the base with lots of textured ingredients, like mushrooms and barley, or lentils and ditalini pasta. And vegetables that break down during cooking and melt away, such as parsnip or winter squash and chestnut, utterly transform the texture.

Corn, polenta, came to Italy from the New World, and yet, along with pasta and rice, it is one of the beloved starch dishes of Italy. Polenta was for the northeastern regions of Italy what potatoes were for Ireland. Corn grew in abundance there and fed many people and still does, so much so that the people of the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region are known as polentoni, polenta eaters. I come from the region, and I grew up eating polenta and still do eat it often. As a child I had just cooked or leftover polenta for breakfast with milk and sugar or with caffe latte, or pan-fried with some sugar and cinnamon sprinkled on top, as well as in endless ways accompanying vegetables, meats, fish, and cheeses. It is rather simple to cook—all you need is cornmeal, water, salt, olive oil, and a few bay leaves. When done, you can enjoy the polenta piping hot or let it cool and take shape, then cut and fry it, or grill and bake it, topped with anything you choose. In this chapter you’ll find it with leeks, with bacon lardoons, with Montasio cheese, or with just an egg yolk nestled in a piping-hot mound of polenta. Beyond the flavor of polenta, I look for the mouth feel, and that depends on the grind. Instant polenta will give you a smooth puddinglike texture, the medium grind a bit more texture, and the coarse will have almost a raspy feel in your mouth. There is also white polenta, milled from white corn, which is used much in the Veneto. And the polenta taragna, which has buckwheat milled along with the yellow corn, has much texture and flavor. The one important caution in cooking polenta is to get it smooth. Start it in cold water and whisk well while it cooks; it may take a bit longer but ensures lump-free polenta. Even though polenta might look done, make sure you cook it the recommended time; its digestibility and flavor increase with longer cooking time.

Gnudi means “naked dumpling,” because it’s truly a stuffing without a pasta shell. So if you love those stuffings in ravioli, skip the pasta—this dish is for you.

I hope you’ve saved some meatballs and sugo (page 146) for this wonderful fresh-pasta lasagna. But if you haven’t, you can follow the basic procedure using sliced, cooked Italian sausage meat instead of the meatballs and another tomato sauce. Note that you’ll need a bit more than a single batch of egg pasta dough—4 extra ounces to be specific—so just make two batches and freeze the extra.

Manicotti are delicious and provide an easy way to enjoy the textures of stuffed fresh pasta baked in sauce.

If you happen to have some meatballs and sugo left over from the recipe on page 146, here’s a simple baked dish that will put them to good use. Just toss them with cooked cavatappi—spiral pastas that do look like corkscrews—and cheeses, then bake. You can also bake this in a mold and turn it out, as a lovely golden torta. Press the filling to fit into a 10-cup Bundt pan or soufflé dish, generously buttered and coated with bread crumbs. Sprinkle bread crumbs and grated cheese on the top (which will become the bottom), and bake at 400° until the edges are golden.

You can make this colorful and fresh-tasting dish anytime with a batch of Twenty-Minute Marinara Sauce and cherry or grape tomatoes, which are in the market almost year-round and often are sweeter than large tomatoes. This is one baked dish in which I use fresh mozzarella in the filling. I love its texture and fresh taste in uncooked or quick cooked pastas, and these can be lost in long cooking. Buy small whole mozzarella balls, an inch in diameter, if you can. Sometimes they are called bocconcini, little mouthfuls, but in my neighborhood the supermarket calls them ciliegine, little cherries. Toss them whole with the hot pasta so they keep their integrity in the baking dish—you don’t want them to melt away like shredded mozzarella on top.

Almost every region of northern Italy has some version of potato-stuffed ravioli. The potato is a constant, whereas the flavoring may change, from onion to chard to raisins to pine nuts. You can come up with some of your favorites. But in my house everybody loves potato-and-bacon ravioli, even fussy kids. You can do all the cooking ahead of time if you want—just mash up the filling while it’s still warm, then refrigerate.

This delicate and quite simple ravioli is a lovely way to enjoy the affinity of pear and cheese. The filling is a lively blend of shredded ripe pear, shredded 3- to-6-months-aged Pecorino Romano (it should be semisoft), and mascarpone—just stirred together at the last moment.

This is a fine fast sauce for Shrimp and Tomato Ravioli and Simple Ricotta Ravioli (preceding recipes) as well as for Potato, Leek, and Bacon Ravioli (page 186). Make the sauce just before the ravioli come out of the pot, for the freshest taste. You should definitely peel the tomatoes for this: see my method on page 261.