Thursday, July 28, 2016

100th Post


Welcome to A Serious Bunburyist’s 100th post! I reached this milestone after five years of exploring pasta, reviewing cookbooks, documenting family recipes and concocting libations. My first post featured a Venetian pasta machine called a torchio or bigolaro. So it seems only fitting that this 100th post introduce my latest pasta making machine (of sorts): a KoMo Fidibus Classic Grain Mill. The plan: to further explore making pasta using freshly milled wheat, including Emmer (Triticum dicoccum), Spelt (Triticum spelta), Einkorn (Triticum monococcum) and Khorasan (Triticum turanicum).

Information on small scale milling for home bakers abounds, but precious little exists for the inquisitive pasta maker.  Paul Bertolli’s 2003 masterpiece Cooking by Hand discusses milling flour for pasta at Bertolli’s Oliveto restaurant and includes a number of pasta dough recipes calling for freshly milled flour.  Marc Vetri’s 2015 Mastering Pasta: The Art of Practice of Handmade Pasta, Gnocchi and Risotto extols the virtues of making pasta with freshly milled flour. Mastering Pasta also contains a lot of helpful milling tips (e.g., use a #35 sieve to sift freshly milled farro to make farro semolina flour). I plan on using these cookbooks as a jumping off point for my exploration.

So here’s to reaching 100! I hope you find the coming posts helpful and informative.