Regular readers of A Serious
Bunburyist know that I celebrate all things torchio.
My maiden post (here) shared a dough recipe that I developed for my new Venetian
pasta press because, after buying my torchio
(here), I found relatively few torchio-related
pasta recipes in cookbooks or on the Internet. So I began to experiment with
semolina, tipo 00 and extra-fine
durum flour and different flour-to-liquid ratios to make a dough that consistently
worked in a torchio. Well, things
have come a long way since my first post in 2010: you can now learn how to use
a torchio to make bigoli, gargati and other pasta shapes
from excellent pasta-centric cookbooks such as Thomas McNaughton’s Flour + Water Pasta. You can also now find
excellent torchio-related information
on a myriad of websites and even glean useful torchio tips on social media apps such as Instagram (of all
places!).
Being a torchio evangelist,
I want to share a fascinating new video created by Vicky Bennison for her Pasta
Grannies project (www.pastagrannies.com). Bennison and her team travel across
Italy filming women using traditional pasta-making techniques that are at risk
of disappearing with the passing of a generation. The following video features
a group of Sardinians using a torchio
to make a long, tubular pasta called sos
cannisones.
I find this video really interesting because it shows a different
approach to making pasta with a torchio than
I typically employ. While I primarily use a blend of wheat (sometimes adding Extra Fancy Durum) flour, the Sardinians in the Pasta Grannies video use semolina. I use whole eggs
enriched with egg yolks to make my dough; the Sardinians use water. I experiment
with different flour-to-liquid ratios with the aim of achieving a very firm, quasi-pliable
dough that does not stick when extruded. The sos cannisones in the video come out of the torchio so soft that a pasta grannie can easily cut it off her
press with a karate chop. The grannies then dry the pasta by carefully placing
the long, soft tubes, one-by-one, on linen sheets so as to avoid the pasta from
touching.
I marvel at the wide, diverse world of pasta making. Thanks
to Pasta Grannies for sharing the skills of these expert pasta makers with the
rest of the world so that we can learn and carry on their culinary craft. You
can subscribe to upcoming Pasta Grannies videos on its YouTube channel.