Buckwheat Bigoli

In June of 2020, A Serious Bunburyist turns 10 years old. I conceived of this website as a place where I would share information about pasta-making, review new cookbooks and memorialize some of my favorite recipes. In my inaugural post I shared a recipe to make a regional Italian pasta called bigoli in a bronze Venetian pasta press called a torchio da bigoli (here). Over the years I’ve posted a number of different bigoli recipes on this site. To start 2020, I want to share another one, this time a dark bigoli version made with buckwheat flour.

Dark Bigoli (Bigoli Scuri)

Oretta Zanini De Vita’s Encyclopedia of Pasta (2009) lists bigoli’s ingredients as “[g]enerally whole-wheat flour made from durum wheat, but sometimes soft-wheat flour, water, and salt, and often duck or hen eggs.”  Zanini De Vita makes no reference to buckwheat flour, but she notes in her remarks that bigoli “…was always dark until not long ago because peasant women made it from whole-wheat flour.” 

In Bugialli on Pasta (1988), the late Italian food historian and teacher Giuliano Bugialli writes “[o]riginally, dark bigoli probably were made using buckwheat flour, since the grain was once plentiful in the Tre Veneti. (Today, the region is more commonly known as Friuli-Venezia Giulia.) But earlier in this century the Italian government began to require that certified commercial pasta be made only from durum wheat flour, and soon even in the home whole-wheat flour came to replace the buckwheat.”

As Bugialli points out, regional Italian pasta makers were—and still are—naturally opportunistic and used available ingredients. In the Encyclopedia’s Entry No. 200 for Pizzoccheri, Zanini De Vita writes “[t]he cultivation of buckwheat in the alpine valleys from Lombardy to Trentino was already widespread toward the fourteenth century, especially in Carnia….” Italy’s Carnia province lies approximately 40 miles northeast of the Veneto region. Whether buckwheat is the original bigoli flour or not, one can easily imagine buckwheat pasta dough finding its way into a Venetian torchio.

Buckwheat

Buckwheat, a flower seed and not a true wheat grass grain, presents challenges to the pasta maker because buckwheat flour contains no gluten. Buckwheat’s characteristics differ by variety, but generally its seeds have a very dark, bitter-tasting outer hull that surrounds a lighter-colored triangular kernel (aka groat). After de-hulling the seeds, mills grind the groats to make buckwheat flour.

Most buckwheat noodle recipes, whether to make Italian pasta or Japanese soba, blend wheat and buckwheat flour to strengthen the dough. In Cooking By Hand (2003), Paul Bertolli writes that buckwheat flour “…has a forceful taste all its own, though the necessity of mixing it with a greater proportion of white flour to strengthen the dough structure also serves to tone down its flavor.” Bertolli’s buckwheat flour blend in Cooking By Hand is approximately 30% buckwheat flour and 70% extra fancy semolina (aka extra fancy durum).

In my experience, extruding a buckwheat dough (e.g., in a torchio) permits the pasta maker to reduce the amount of wheat flour used when making buckwheat pasta without detrimentally affecting the dough’s structure. Exceptions to this general rule exist, especially if making pasta with a coarse, stoneground buckwheat flour containing flecks of hull. However, using a torchio to extrude buckwheat pasta generally allows the pasta maker to focus on taste and texture and worry a little less about dough strength.

Over the last three years I have made buckwheat pasta with buckwheat flour from a number of sources. I used my KoMo grain mill to grind fresh buckwheat flour from store-bought groats. I tried different buckwheat flour from mills here in the Pacific Northwest and beyond. My favorite homemade buckwheat pasta uses a Japanese Ni-Hachi style soba flour (80% buckwheat and 20% type 00 wheat flour) that I bought on-line from Anson Mills in South Carolina. I enjoy the flavor and texture of pasta made from this finely ground blend.

The following recipe, which serves 2, uses Anson Mills’s soba flour without adding any additional wheat flour. The first few times I tried this soba flour to make bigoli with my torchio, I added small amounts of extra wheat flour believing I needed to strengthen the dough. I found adding additional wheat flour unnecessary. Anson Mills’s buckwheat-rich blend works just fine as is with a torchio.

1) Put 115 grams of Anson Mills Ni-Hachi style soba flour into the bowl of a standing mixer equipped with a mixing paddle.

2) Put 1 whole large egg and 1 egg yolk into a glass beaker and beat the egg mixture together.

3) Turn on the mixer and set it at its lowest speed. Very—and this is important—slowly add small amounts of the beaten egg mixture into the flour. Patiently wait between each small pour to allow the mixer to incorporate the egg into the flour. From start to finish, the step of adding the egg mixture to form the dough takes me about 10 minutes, more or less.

You will probably not need to add all of the egg mixture to get the proper consistency for this particular pasta dough. On average I use approximately 58 to 59 grams of the egg mixture for 115 grams of Anson Mills’s soba flour. The dough should not come completely together in the mixer bowl and will look crumbly. I point this out because it is very easy to over-hydrate a buckwheat-rich pasta dough and a sticky dough can cause a mess when extruding a long, thin noodle like bigoli. Here’s a picture of the ready dough in my mixer bowl.

4) Remove the bowl from the mixer and reach into the bowl to bring the dough together with your hand. Form the dough into a log shape that will fit into the torchio’s chamber. The dough will look and feel dry, but don’t worry, it will soften as it hydrates in step 5, below. 

5) Very tightly wrap the dough log twice in plastic film and let the dough rest at room temperature for 30 minutes. Tightly wrapping the dough helps to hydrate the dough.

6) After 30 minutes, unwrap the dough, assemble your torchio with a bigoli die and place the dough in the torchio’s chamber.  Set the piston into the chamber and turn the handle. Cut the pasta at your desired length. (I aim for approximately 8-inch long noodles.) The extruded bigoli should feel just a little tacky, but not unworkably sticky.

Once cooked, this dark buckwheat bigoli boasts a pronounced toasty, almost nutty flavor. Many traditional Northern Italian recipes for buckwheat pasta (e.g., bigoli, blecs, grumi di grano saraceno and pizzoccheri) call for less buckwheat and include milk and butter in addition to eggs. These ingredients, although delicious, often mask buckwheat’s unique flavor.

If the idea of a buckwheat-extruded pasta appeals to you, feel free to try different buckwheat blends and torchio dies to create a pasta that has your desired taste and texture. I like making a buckwheat version of fiorentini (here). Or consider using a spaghetti quadri die (here) to create a square, soba-like noodle.

Finally, I cannot end this post in good conscience without providing this caveat: Extruding a dry dough will put stress on a torchio and, after extruding your pasta, you may find it difficult to remove the die ring nut by hand. I solve this problem by employing a rubber mallet to gently tap the die ring nut clockwise to loosen it.

Pasta Grattata

After sliding dough into the chamber of my torchio pasta press, I insert the machine’s piston and turn the handle until a small amount of pasta—about 1/4-inch—pokes through the bronze die. I trim this pasta off and put it aside before turning the torchio’s handle in earnest to extrude the dough.

Sometime ago while making bigoli (here), I made my customary trim cut. This time it struck me that the small bits of pasta that I held in my hand resembled a unique pasta shape in their own right. I made a mental note to do a little research to find the shape’s name.

A couple of days later, by a happy stroke of serendipity, I came across a package of grattini at DeLaurenti, an excellent food and wine shop in Seattle’s Pike Place Market. Although grattini looked slightly different than the pasta I trim off of my bigoli die, the package gave me a lead.

Oretta Zanini De Vita writes that grattini is the Emilian name for Pasta Grattata, entry No. 187 in her Encyclopedia of Pasta (University of California Press, 2009). Pasta grattata literally means “grated pasta”. The shape goes by a myriad of different names from Italy’s north to south. In Emilia it’s grattini. In Friuli, it’s called pasta grattada and mignaculis. In the Veneto it goes by the name of pasta gratada, pasta gratadè and pestariei. Lombardy, Tuscany, Lazio, Abruzzo, Molise, Basilicata, Puglia and Sicily each have their own unique name for the shape.

The traditional way to create pasta grattata is to make a very hard dough from flour and water, to dry the dough, and then to grate it “on a large-hole grater, or [crumble] it with fingers, to make [irregular tiny shapes that are cooked in broth].” Zanini De Vita writes that nowadays you are more likely to find pasta grattata made with an egg dough, which the package of grattini, above, proudly proclaims.

As I searched for grattini through Zanini De Vita’s Encyclopedia, I came across another pasta shape that resembles my bigoli trim. Grandine, entry No. 119, literally means “hailstones”. Like pasta grattata, one finds grandine throughout Italy’s regions. Although the shapes resemble one another, Zanini De Vita writes that grandine is a mass-produced shape made with durum flour and water. In Sicily, grandine goes by the name of pirticuneddi and palline da schioppo (“musket balls”). Zanini De Vita ends her grandine entry by writing: “In Sicily, pirticuneddi are mentioned among the first pastas made with a special torchio, the so-called paste d’arbitrio.”

If you own a torchio, making pasta grattata—or grandine, it’s your call—at home is super easy. It just takes some time and, I believe, two people: one to make small incremental turns of the torchio’s handle and another to cut the hundreds of tiny bits of pasta that come through the press’s spaghettoni die. I suppose a person with a strong back could both turn and then bend down to cut, but that’s way too much up-and-down to my mind.

If you don’t own a torchio, you can make pasta grattata the old fashion way with a box grater. I found a recipe by the late, great Giuliano Bugialli’s (here). You can find his recipe in Bugialli on Pasta (Simon & Schuster, 1988). Bugialli calls the shape pasta grattugiata, pasta grattata or pasta rasa. He introduces the shape as follows: “Pasta grattugiata exists in different parts of Italy under various names. While this kind of pasta is homemade, it has even been adapted to commercial dried pasta under the name of grandinine or pastine, and in modern times is used mostly in broth.” 

I find Bugialli’s recipe, which originates from Reggio-Emilia, particularly interesting. He mixes all-purpose flour, very fine semolina flour and freshly grated Parmigiano cheese with eggs to make a dough similar to the one used to create passatelli sans the dry bread crumbs. Bugialli also shares a neat trick to prepare the dough for grating: knead the dough for 15 minutes until it turns very hard, then wrap it in plastic and freeze the dough for 45 minutes. Why? He writes: “This replaces several hours of drying.”

As both Zanini De Vita and Bugialli point out, most cooks serve pasta grattata in a broth or soup. I suppose one could also cook the shape like risotto. I plan to try pasta grattata in a pea pod broth with polpettini, leeks and peas all dusted with pecorino cheese.

Giuliano Bugialli, food writer and teacher: 1931-2019

I just learned that Giuliano Bugialli died on 26 April 2019. You can read his obituary (here) at the New York Times.

After purchasing The Fine Art of Italian Cooking in the late 1980’s, I wanted to amass all of Mr. Bugialli’s cookbooks. His works serve as an expert guide to anyone who wants to understand traditional Italian cuisine. I learned about nocino (here) from his Foods of Naples and Campania (and for this I shall always be grateful). I constantly reference his Bugialli on Pasta. Case-in-point: my 18 April 2019 post (here) on Nettle Powder Pasta. I believe Bugialli’s Classic Techniques of Italian Cooking rivals Jacques Pepin’s The Art of Cooking.

To honor Mr. Bugialli, I want to share one of my favorite recipes from all of his cookbooks. Pasta con I carciofi comes from Bugialli on Pasta. In his chapter on Pasta and Vegetables, he includes five artichoke recipes. The following Sicilian recipe is a delicious take on Pasta alla carbonara but with artichokes. It serves 4 to 6.

1 large lemon, cut in half

3 large artichokes

½ cup olive oil

1 medium-sized red onion, peeled

Salt and freshly ground black pepper

1 cup lukewarm water

2 extra-large eggs

2 tablespoons freshly grated pecorino Siciliano or romano cheese

1 pound dried rigatoni, preferably imported Italian

Squeeze the lemon into a bowl of cold water and drop in the lemon halves. Add the artichokes to soak for 30 minutes. Meanwhile, finely chop the onion on a board. Clean the artichokes following the instructions on page 67, and cut them in quarters. Then cut each quarter into thin slices and return to the lemon water.

Heat the oil in a medium-sized flameproof casserole over medium heat; when the oil is warm, add the onion and sauté for 5 minutes. Drain the artichokes and add to the casserole, mix very well, and sauté for 4 minutes more. Season to taste with salt and pepper, and add the water. Cover the casserole and cook for 30 minutes, stirring every so often with a wooden spoon. When finished, the liquid should be completely absorbed and the artichokes very soft.

Bring a large pot of cold water to a boil. Mix the eggs with the cheese and salt and pepper to taste in a large serving bowl. When the water reaches a boil, add coarse salt to taste, then add the pasta and cook until al dente, for 9 to 12 minutes depending on the brand. Drain the pasta, transfer to the bowl with the egg mixture, mix gently but thoroughly, then add the artichokes with their juice. Mix again and serve with a few twists of black pepper.

Bugialli was a great teacher and so, no surprise, this recipe offers so many valuable cooking lessons. First, US grocery store produce often benefits from re-hydration. I’d like to think this was true in 1988 but no longer the case in 2019—but sadly, no. To this day I still trim and soak store-bought vegetables to re-hydrate them before cooking. Second, you can create so many beautiful pasta sauces by employing the technique of gently braising vegetables—in the case of this recipe, artichokes—to tenderness. Finally, I love that Bugialli uses water to braise the artichokes. Although today I often cook with rice koji stock or some other super-liquid, this recipe reminds me that water delivers pure flavor.