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 ©

Wholemeal apple cake

I have lots of organic apples to use, so this cake is actually packed with apples! I use about 10, peeled and thinly sliced and sprayed with lime juice (I usually use lemon, but I have lots of organic limes too).
For the batter I used 3 large free range eggs, 130 g demerara sugar, 120 g melted salted butter, a pinch of ground cinnamon and 180 g wholemeal flour. At the end I added half a tsp of cream of tartar and 1/3 of baking soda. I folded the apples in, and poured everything into a baking tin. For the topping I used 6 tbsp of wholemeal flour, 3 tbsp of demerara sugar and 50 g of salted butter, cubed. I mixed the topping to make a crumble and spread it over the cake. I baked the cake at 180°C and it took forever! About one hour or a bit longer! I guess it was because it had so many apples in it. But in the end it was just so yummy and moist and it lasted about 5 days!

I am entering this recipe to Sweet New Zealand, the monthly blogging event for Kiwi bloggers. Our July 2013 host is Nicola from Homegrown Kitchen, click here to enter.

Photos and Recipes by Alessandra Zecchini ©

Wholemeal spaghetti with ricotta and pine nut sauce

I am trying to eat more wholemeal pasta, something that I am not really used to. But for some reason I like wholemeal spaghetti, as long as they have a rich creamy sauce, like this one!

Toast a handful of pine nuts in a frying pan until they start to get brown and oily. Using a mortar and pestle mush half of them with a clove of garlic (peeled), a few leaves of basil (not too many, this is not a Genovese pesto) and then thin everything down with extra virgin olive oil. Add a few tbsp of ricotta and adjust with salt and pepper to taste.

Cook the wholemeal spaghetti al dente, then thin the ricotta sauce with a little hot water from the spaghetti pot. Drain the spaghetti and mix in the sauce. Top with the remaining pine nuts, and with some parmesan cheese, if you like. 

For a vegan version instead of ricotta you could add some soft tofu: the pine nuts, basil, olive oil and garlic should be able to flavor the tofu sufficiently (unless you are one of those crafty people who can make vegan soy ricotta, and then you are set!). 

 Photos and Recipes by Alessandra Zecchini ©