Wholemeal fresh pasta - pasta fresca integrale

Wholemeal fresh pasta is delicious! I made it with Agnese and her son Antonio, they get the flour from a local mill, organic and all :-). First you need to pass it through a sieve.

Leave the bran behind, this will be for the chickens, they make the eggs for the pasta!

And this is Agnese's knife to cut tagliatelle and maltagliati.

Then you make the dough, usually for  each 500g of white flour I use five eggs, but for wholemeal pasta you need more, about six or seven eggs. Of course you can also mix wholemeal and white flour, in any case, the dough was done by machine and you can see if it is the case to add an extra egg or not, it all depends on the egg size and if the dough looks too dry. Once the dough is ready Agnese cuts it...

And then rolls it so it is ready to go through the pasta machine.

From the largest setting to the thinnest roll roll roll!

Then fold the rolled pasta and cut into tagliatelle

Now maltagliati: fold the rolled pasta and cut the corners, this is Arantxa doing it:

Maltagliati is great for soups, like pasta e fagioli, or with a simple clear broth. Wholemeal tagliatelle goes well with thick and flavoursome sauces.

I made it with a mushroom sauce (porcini, garlic, tomato and cream), amazing!

Photos and Recipes by Alessandra Zecchini ©

Tagliatelle ai funghi, in memory of Antonio Carluccio

When I learned that Antonio Carluccio had died I was really sad, I didn't know hime well, but I did meet him twice, and wrote to him once (and got a reply!), he was an inspiration. When I was young and poor and constantly hungry and cold in London I used watch his programmes, and dream of Italy, sun and endless food. I met him in the street there but I was so shy that the only thing I could say was Buongiorno and run away! After writing my first book I emailed him (his publisher) to send him a copy, and got an email reply (signed by him, but I will never know if he wrote it) and a thank you and well done!. Then I met him two years ago at Gusto at the Grand in Auckland, and that was fantastic, I was sitting at his table so I managed to chat a bit with him. What a great memory!

So to honour his legacy I took out my pasta board and went out in the garden, (it was a lovely day), and made some tagliatelle. I even added some flowers to some, just for fun. To make pasta I just use an egg for every 100g of flour, this is good for two people, so double for 4 and so on. Since I have two teenagers I used 300g of flour and 3 eggs :-). 

Then I made a sauce, I had a big pack of dried porcini mushrooms which a soaked, and some other mushrooms, which I cut, and since I didn't have many I added some eggplant, cut and salted (to sweat). If you add eggplant to mushrooms it will absorb the flavour and the texture is a little similar so you can dream that you have lots of mushrooms. I sautéed the fresh mushrooms and eggplant with a little olive oil, chopped parsley and garlic cloves and then added the dried mushrooms and their water, a big bottle of tomato passata,  extra tomato puree and salt to taste. At the end I had a huge pot of sauce, even after I cooked the lot for one hour (to thickens the sauce), I used some for pasta the first day and for a pie the day after.

We had the tagliatelle and mushrooms with Parmigiano, and a glass of red whine, and toasted to Antonio. Goodbye Carluccio, sit tibi terra levis.

Photos and Recipes by Alessandra Zecchini ©