Strangolapreti alla Trentina

This post is the second installment in a short series on comfort food recipes. In my first post, I shared a recipe for Vermouth-braised Chicken (here) from my wife's maternal grandmother who lived in Nashota, Wisconsin. Now we travel to Italy’s Trentino-Alto Adige region to cook Strangolapreti alla Trentina. The recipe for this delicious spinach and ricotta gnocchi comes from the Satori family, who live in the village of Levico Terme. Michele Satori, the newly elected mayor of Levico, graciously agreed to transcribe and translate his mother’s dumpling recipe into English. I want to extend a heartfelt grazie mille to Michele and his mother, Michelina, for sharing their wonderful family recipe and showing us how to make Strangolapreti alla Trentina.

Ingredients yield 4 to 5 servings

For the gnocchi:

1 kilogram of spinach

3 eggs

150 grams of ricotta cheese

approximately 100 to 150 grams of tipo 00 flour

freshly grated Parmesan cheese

nutmeg, salt and pepper

For the sauce:

butter

sage

Boil the spinach in a large pot filled with lightly salted water, then strain and press the spinach to eliminate any water. Finely mince the spinach and place in a large bowl.

Now add the eggs, some nutmeg powder, the ricotta cheese, 100 grams of flour, some spoons of grated Parmesan, salt and pepper into the spinach. Mix it all well.

Now, with a spoon, build a gnocco about the size of a nut, and put it in the boiling water in which you cooked the spinach. See if the gnocco holds together or if it melts in the water. If the dumpling dissolves, add some more flour to the green mixture.

When the spinach mixture is at the correct consistency, start to make the gnocchi one at a time and put them into the boiling water. When they come to surface—it should take about 4 to 5 minutes—they are ready. Now strain them and lay them in a casserole dish.

Meanwhile you have prepared the brown butter with sage (that is, a good piece of butter, melted and cooked to become a little brown with some sage leaves). Pour the melted butter over the gnocchi, sprinkle Parmesan cheese over them and BUON APPETITO !!!

These photographs show Nonna Michelina making Strangolapreti alla Trentina.

A few notes. The recipe calls for 1 kilogram of spinach, which is an untrimmed weight (i.e., the spinach’s weight with stems). Stem and clean the spinach before adding it to the boiling water. Nonna Michelina minces the cooked spinach by hand. I tried this method, but I couldn’t duplicate her fine knife skills. I default to using a food processor to purée the spinach.

If you live in the US, use large eggs; you want to find eggs that weigh about 60 grams each in shell.

The amount of flour that you need to add to the spinach mixture depends upon a number of factors (e.g., the amount of / moisture in the spinach, the size of the eggs, and moisture of the ricotta). Start with 100 grams of flour and adjust as necessary.

And speaking of ricotta, you will note from Michele’s photographs that the Italian ricotta that Nonna Michelina uses looks drier than most of the ricotta available here in the US. To address this difference, I use a fine sieve to drain the 150 grams of ricotta in the refrigerator overnight.

Vermouth-braised Chicken

Over the course of this year I plan to explore a number of comfort food recipes graciously supplied by my family and friends. Most of these recipes memorialize beloved dishes made by grandmothers and great-grandmothers. We’ll travel to Trentino-Alto Adige in Northern Italy to cook Strangolapreti, a delicious spinach and ricotta gnocchi. We’ll make an Armenian beef and fermented cabbage stew called Tutoo. But first, let’s start this new series of posts with a braised chicken recipe mentioned in passing here, that my wife’s family affectionately refers to as Grandma’s Chicken. This dish embodies the type of simple comfort food that I look forward to sharing with you in the months to come.

The grandma of Grandma’s Chicken-fame was born in 1890 and lived on a dairy farm located about 30 miles west of Milwaukee. Clara Lucinda Dreyer Solveson raised three beautiful daughters, and the youngest, Joy, brought the recipe with her to the West Coast. Clara’s recipe epitomizes straightforward homey fare. Accomplished cooks can likely approximate this family favorite dish based solely upon these instructions: dust a sectioned chicken in flour; brown; add vermouth, herbs and spices; braise until tender. But why leave something that tastes so good to chance? Here’s the family’s recipe.

½ cup all-purpose flour

3 to 4 pound chicken, sectioned into 10 pieces

3 tablespoons canola oil

½ to ¾ cup dry vermouth

3 tablespoons freshly chopped Italian parsley

Salt

Freshly ground black pepper

Cayenne (or paprika)

1. Put ½ cup flour into a bowl and dredge the chicken pieces, with skin on, in flour to lightly coat. The chicken skin adds fat, and thus flavor, to the dish; the flour thickens the sauce.

2. Warm a heavy 12-inch skillet over medium-high heat for a minute or two. Add 3 tablespoons of canola oil to the skillet. When the oil is hot (but not smoking), add the chicken pieces to the skillet skin-side down. Do not crowd the pan otherwise the chicken will steam and not brown. You may need to brown the chicken in batches. Take care not to scorch the chicken; your goal is to create a golden, light brown chicken skin.

3. When the skin is browned, turn the pieces over and brown the other side. Don’t worry if flour (or even bits of the chicken) sticks to the skillet. These will help to flavor your sauce. Rotate and turn the chicken around the pan to uniformly brown the pieces.

4. After browning the chicken, add ½ to ¾ cup of dry vermouth to the skillet and cook for about 2 minutes or so. The amount of liquid at this stage in the cooking process determines if the final sauce is thick or thin. Use a wooden spoon to carefully mix the vermouth into the browned chicken. Scrape any browned bits to incorporate this flavoring into your sauce. Once done, reduce the heat to achieve a gentle simmer. Add the parsley and season the chicken with salt, freshly ground pepper and a pinch of cayenne (or paprika).

5. Cover and cook at a gentle simmer until the chicken is tender. This should take approximately 45 minutes to 1 hour. Occasionally check in on the braise to make sure that the heat is just right and that the sauce is neither too thick nor too thin. If too thick for your taste, add a splash of water or stock.

Once the chicken is tender, serve with rice or buttered noodles. You should have enough chicken to feed 6 people (or 2 to 3 hungry nephews).

Pasta Dough No. 3 (for a Torchio)

A recent profile of Oakland’s Ramen Shop in The Art of Eating (Issue No. 92) inspired the following dough recipe for a torchio pasta press. According to the article, Ramen Shop makes its noodle dough with a blend of Central Milling type 00 and malted all-purpose flour, gluten, and kansui, a mixture of sodium carbonate and potassium carbonate. The Art of Eating author pronounced Ramen Shop’s noodles “exceptional”; I agree, having slurped my fair share of the restaurant’s noodles. What would happen, I wondered, if I used a similar flour blend but replaced the gluten, kansui and water with an egg and water mixture tailored to a torchio pasta press? The results tasted amazing.

When you read the following recipe, you’ll see that I list precise weights for the flour and for each component of the egg mixture. I stumbled upon these weights when I used a 58-gram egg, which produced 52 grams of egg sans shell, and a 56-gram egg, which contained a 20-gram yolk. I liked the results so much that I stayed with these amounts. Using precise weights allows you to achieve extremely consistent dough from batch to batch. It also helps when scaling the recipe up or down. The following produces approximately 240 grams of dough.

110 grams Central Milling organic type 00 normal pizza flour (11.2%)

50 grams Central Milling organic Beehive malted all-purpose flour (10.5%)

2 grams kosher salt

82 grams of the following egg mixture: 52 grams whole egg, beaten; 20 grams egg yolk; and 10 grams cold water

 1. Sift the flours into the bowl of a stand mixer. Add the salt. Using a paddle attachment, mix together the flours and salt. In a glass, beat the egg mixture.

 2. With the mixer running on low speed, slowly pour the egg mixture into the mixing bowl in small batches. Mix the dough for about 2 to 3 minutes. The dough should be clumpy and slightly damp but shouldn’t come together into a ball. It should, however, hold together if tightly squeezed.

 3. Remove the bowl from the mixer and add any dough on the paddle to the mixing bowl. Using your hand, bring the dough together into a large ball in the mixing bowl. Knead the dough in the bowl or on a work surface for approximately 30 seconds. Form the dough into a log that can slide into the torchio’s chamber. Tightly wrap the dough in plastic and leave it to rest at room temperature for 1 hour.

I tested the above recipe, which makes enough pasta to serve 2 to 3 people, using a Bottene No. 5 spaghetti (1.75mm) die from Emiliomiti. (I also ran the dough through a bronze bigoli die with excellent results.) Once extruded, I cut the spaghetti into approximately 12-inch long pieces that I lightly dusted with semolina flour and placed on a dishtowel-lined baking tray.

To cook the pasta, bring a large pot of salted water to a boil. Add the fresh spaghetti, stir the pasta and when the water returns to a boil, cook for approximately 1 to 1.5 minutes. Taste to determine if the pasta is ready. If so, drain and add the spaghetti to your ready sauce, mix the two together and cook the pasta and sauce for 1 to 2 minutes.