Surely we live in The
Golden Age of pasta making instruction. In March of this year, Ten Speed Press
published Marc Vetri’s Mastering Pasta. Right
on its heels, Chronicle Books put out Jenn Louis’s Pasta By Hand. Last year, Ten Speed published Thomas McNaughton’s Flour + Water Pasta (here), and in 2013, Norton
released Oretta Zanini De Vita and Maureen B. Fant’s Sauces & Shapes: Pasta the Italian Way (here). Of these works, Mastering Pasta and Flour + Water Pasta share the most similarities; both books offer an
excellent pasta making primer followed by mostly modern (as opposed to
traditional) pasta and sauce parings. Sauces
& Shapes covers a broad range of authentic Italian recipes for pasta,
both fresh and dry, in soups and sauces.
Jenn Louis’s outstanding Pasta By Hand takes a unique and different
path from these other books. Louis exclusively focuses on fresh, handmade pasta
dumplings. She defines Italian dumplings as “carefully handcrafted nubs of
dough that are poached, simmered, baked, or sautéed.” As one might expect, her
book covers gnocchi, perhaps the most obvious of Italian dumplings, but as
Louis points out, “while all gnocchi are dumplings, not all dumplings are
gnocchi.” So scan Pasta By Hand’s
Contents and you’ll find recipes for Sardinian malloreddus, Puglian orecchiette,
Molisan cavatelli and Ligurian trofie.
But the majority of
recipes in Pasta by Hand celebrate what
most pasta eaters think of as gnocchi: bite-sized dumplings made by combining
flour and a mixture of potato or a vegetable and cheese. Look up gnocco—the singular of gnocchi—in Oretta
Zanini De Vita’s Encyclopedia of Pasta
and you’ll learn: “The word gnocco is
not of Latin origin, but one of the many words that culinary Italian has taken
from the immense pool of dialect terms, in this case probably from the Veneto,
where we find the dialect word gnoco.
The latter may go back to the time of the Longobard domination and the term knohha, which is nocca or nodo in Italian,
or “knot.” Thus, the old name probably referred to the irregular shape of tree
knots.” Fascinating!
Pasta By Hand dives deep into gnocchi. Louis explores these dumplings by region. From Campania we get a
traditional potato gnocchi bathed in a simple tomato sauce with fresh
mozzarella and torn basil leaves. From Emilia-Romagna comes a recipe for potato
gnocchi enriched with egg and ricotta paired with a range of traditional
sauces, such as Brown Butter and Sage or Lamb Ragù. And from Trentino-Alto
Adige, Louis shares a recipe for Strangolapreti
that is a close cousin of Michelina Satori’s recipe for Strangolapreti alla Trentina that I shared with you last year
(here).
With so many dishes to
tempt me, I had a hard time deciding what to cook first. In honor of the Satori
Family, I went with a traditional spätzli from Trentino-Alto Adige. I own a
nifty German spaetzle plane or spätzlehobel from Küchenprofi—this is the spaetzle maker to buy here in the
states—so whipping up these little dumplings took no time at all. Louis’s
recipe serves 6.
350 G / 2½ cups
all-purpose flour
2 Tsp kosher salt
2 eggs
300 G / 1¼ cups whole
milk, plus more as needed
extra-virgin olive oil for
tossing
sauce of your choice
(suggestions to follow)
In a large bowl or the
bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a paddle attachment, combine the flour, salt,
eggs, and milk. Mix with a wooden spoon or on medium speed until just combined,
3 to 4 minutes. Stir more vigorously or raise the speed up a notch or two and
beat until the batter becomes slightly shiny and elastic, 3 to 5 minutes. Cover
the bowl with plastic wrap and let rest at room temperature for 30 minutes.
After 30 minutes, check
the texture of the batter—it should be thin and elastic, with more stretch than
a typical batter. If it is too thick, add more milk, 1 Tbsp at a time, to
achieve this texture.
Line a baking sheet with
parchment paper. Bring a large pot filled with generously salted water to a
simmer over medium-high heat. Working in batches, press the dough through a
spätzli maker or colander into the simmering water. Simmer the spätzli until
they float to the surface, about 1 minute. Stir to release any spätzli that have
settled on the bottom of the pot. Simmer for 1 minute more, until tender.
Remove immediately with a fine-mesh strainer and transfer to the prepared
baking sheet. Toss the cooked spätzli with a little olive oil, so they don’t
stick together. Allow to cool to room temperature. Finish with your choice of
sauce. Serve right away.
Louis recommends either a
Sage and Speck or Brown Butter with Sage sauce to pair with her traditional
spätzli. But it’s hard to go too terribly wrong if you want a sauce that heads
in a different direction. I topped my spätzli with Benton’s bacon sautéed with
shimeji mushroons and peas. You probably wouldn’t find this combination in
Trentino-Alto Adige, but I found these ingredients in my refrigerator and the
finished dish tasted delicious.
Louis’s recipe scales down
nicely if you halve the recipe. You can add chopped thyme, parsley or oregano
to make an herb-version of the dish. Louis also provides a recipe for Spinach
Spätzli and Beet Spätzli. I did have to thin out the batter with milk, but I
used medium eggs for my batter. If you want to see what the batter should look
like, check out Jenn Louis’s “spaetzle prep 101” on Vine, a video posting site.
Her Portland restaurant, Lincoln, has posted a number of short looping video
clips that help clarify some of the shapes and techniques featured in Pasta By Hand. The loop for menietti is particularly helpful given
the rarity of this shape. Actually, Chronicle Books and Louis should film a
loop for each pasta shape in the book and post the videos on-line. Why not?