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.
