Straw & Hay Gramigna

Leafing through Michael White’s Classico e Moderno (Random House, 2013), I came across a version of Gramigna con salsiccia that caught my attention. In the recipe’s introduction, White writes: “Befitting its name, “little weeds,” gramigna is made both in yellow and green versions, the latter with a spinach dough, often served together.” The idea of a paglia e fieno (“straw and hay”) version of gramigna intrigued me. Authentic? I pulled my copy of Oretta Zanini De Vita’s Encyclopedia of Pasta (University of California Press, 2009) off the shelf and looked up gramigna. Sure enough, Zanini De Vita covers the straw and hay variation: “The factory-made version varies from small to medium size, in the shape of a tiny worm, and is often found in a paglia e fieno version.” I posted an egg dough version of gramigna (here), but never attempted a green pasta dough for the torchio. No time like the present.

I developed the following green dough recipe using spinach, but nettles, basil, parsley, kale or Swiss chard should also work. In Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking (Knopf, 1992), Marcella Hazen advocates finely chopping blanched then well-dried spinach “with a knife, but not in a food processor which draws out too much moisture.” Giuliano Bugialli, in his updated The Fine Art of Italian Cooking (Random House, 1989) also makes his green dough with finely chopped spinach. In Cooking by Hand (Potter, 2003), Paul Bertolli makes his green pasta with a purée of spinach or young nettles using either a mortar and pestle or a food processor. I experimented with puréed, finely chopped and pounded spinach. Each type worked just fine. Pasta made with puréed spinach looks uniformly green. Finely chopped spinach produced a slightly lighter, speckled green pasta.

The following recipe make approximately 250 grams of green pasta dough suitable for a torchio pasta press.

60g stemmed spinach leaves

80g Central Milling Organic Type 00 Flour/11.2% protein

80g Central Milling Organic Extra Fancy Durum Flour/15%+ protein

2g fine kosher salt

whole egg, approximately 50g (without shell)

egg yolk, approximately 20g

water

1. Wash the stemmed spinach leaves—multiple times if necessary—to completely remove any dirt and grit. Bring a sauce pan of salted water to a boil. Cook the spinach for a minute or two. Transfer the spinach into a bowl of cold salted water. Once the spinach cools, remove it and drain well. Squeeze the spinach until it is mostly dry. Purée the blanched spinach with a food processor or immersion blender. Alternatively, finely chop the spinach with a knife. Put aside 17 grams (approximately 1 tablespoon) of puréed spinach to make the pasta dough. Use the remaining spinach in another dish so as not to be wasteful.

2. Sift the flours into the bowl of a stand mixer. Add the salt. Using a paddle attachment, mix together the flours and salt.

3. Place a mixing glass on a scale. Tare the scale and crack a medium-sized egg into the glass. The white and yolk should weigh approximately 50 grams, give or take. Crack another egg and add its yolk to the mixing glass, bringing the weight of the eggs to somewhere around 70 grams or so. Add the 17 grams of spinach purée to the eggs. The goal is to create an egg and spinach solution that weighs 91 grams. If the mixture weighs less than 91 grams, then add water to bring the weight up to 91 grams. If the mixture weighs more than 91 grams, remove the overage and reserve in case you need more liquid to make the dough. Use a hand whisk to beat the egg and spinach mixture.

4. With the stand mixer running on low speed, slowly pour the egg and spinach mixture into the mixing bowl in small batches. After adding all of the egg and spinach mixture, continue to mix the dough for about 2 to 3 minutes. You may need to add a little bit more liquid to create a dough with the proper consistency. The dough should look clumpy (see following photo). The finished dough should hold together when squeezed.

5. 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. Don’t worry if the dough feels hard and is difficult to knead. The dough will soften as it rests. Form the dough into a log narrow enough to ultimately slide into the torchio’s chamber. Tightly wrap the dough in plastic and let it rest at room temperature for 30 minutes. After 30 minutes, insert the dough into the torchio and crank away! After extruding, let the pasta dry at room temperature for a couple of hours.

A few notes and observations. I use a flour mixture containing 50% extra fancy durum flour in order to add strength to the dough. I worried that the spinach purée might compromise the dough’s plasticity without the benefit of the durum flour’s extra gluten. I like how the 50/50 flour blend performed and tasted.

To make my yellow “straw” pasta, I created another 250 grams of egg dough sans spinach. I used the same 50/50 flour blend adding cream and extra egg whites in place of the spinach purée. Together the green and yellow pasta weighed 500 grams—just over a pound—serving 4 to 6 depending upon appetites.

I tried my paglia e fieno gramigna with a number of different white sauces. I made a cabbage and sausage sauce from a recipe in Caz Hildebrand and Jacob Kenedy’s The Geometry of Pasta (Boxtree, 2010). Kenedy braises sausage and cabbage in equal parts chicken stock and milk creating a sauce that tastes rich without being heavy.

My favorite sauce turned out to be a variation of Gramigna al ragù di salsiccia (here) wherein I switched out the tomato purée for a milk/chicken stock mixture. Try it and see what you think.

Feel free to experiment with the green dough using different bronze dies. I made a green rigatoni that worked well in a light cream sauce with pancetta and peas dusted with Parmesan.

Cleaning Torchio Pasta Dies

My Bottene Model B torchio pasta press arrived with two bronze dies to make bigoli (here) and gargarti (here), Venetian variations of spaghettoni and sedani, respectively. Although the torchio originated in the Veneto, the press accommodates a myriad of bronze dies allowing you to extrude classic pasta shapes from across Italy, such as gramigna (here) from Emilia-Romagna or tonnarelli (here) from Lazio.

Search the WWW (or explore this site) and you will find plenty of recipes to make dough suitable for a hand-cranked torchio. You will not, however, find much information on the Internet on how to clean the torchio’s pasta dies. Pasta shops and restaurants that keep pasta machine dies in regular production often store their dies in plain water or water spiked with vinegar (approximately 15 ml per liter of water). Whether you use plain or acidic water, every pastaio I queried recommends changing the soaking water every day.

Although soaking dies makes sense when one keeps a die in constant use, this practice does not work for me and probably not many other home cooks. Here’s my die cleaning routine (which I do not represent as the standard of care). First, after extruding pasta with my torchio, I remove the die and pick out as much of the dough left in the die that I can using a toothpick or other similar small wooden skewer. I can entirely clean certain simple dies, such as my bigoli and gargarti dies, by using a toothpick.

Survey a range of pasta dies and you will notice that many dies have inserts (i.e., bronze plugs that seat into holes bored into the die blank). These inserts, some with open backs while other partially enclosed, do the work of manipulating the dough into the pasta’s shape using surfaces, ridges and/or pins. Certain dies, depending upon their insert’s configuration, take a lot of work to clean. Again, I usually start with a toothpick or small wooden skewer to remove as much dough as possible. I then soak the die in lukewarm soapy water for a couple of hours or overnight. I might again try to pick out more dough by hand and soak the die again. I next use a Waterpik that I purchased to clean dies. I find cleaning dies with a Waterpik yields good results, but also makes quite a damp mess. Spray goes everywhere.

Some dies are so difficult to clean that they need multiple soaks and take a couple of passes with the Waterpik to dislodge all the small pieces of dough that become trapped in their inserts. Nevertheless, the soak and Waterpik method remains the best way that I have found to clean certain complex dies (e.g., lumache, perciatelli and 23mm rigatoni).

Personally, I find cleaning bronze pasta dies A Total Bore. I’ll admit it: I may not buy a die if the die looks like it will be too difficult to clean. Call me lazy, but if a die involves too much work to clean, I am simply less likely to use it. I’m looking at you, perciatelli.

Gramigna al Ragù di Salsiccia

My February 2013 post (here) covers making fresh gramigna in a torchio pasta press. Home kitchens, restaurants and cookbooks typically pair the sprout-like shaped gramigna with a sausage ragù. I listed a number of gramigna recipes from various sources including a recipe from Trattoria da Gianni a la Vécia Bulàgna in Bologna that Slow Food Editore published in its Italian-language cookbook entitled La Pasta [2010]. Of the sauces that I have tried with gramigna, this version remains one of my favorites. The simple ragù, although rich, tastes bright and not heavy. Here’s my translation of Gramigna al Ragù di Salsiccia from La Pasta.

Time to prepare and cook: 1¼ hours

Serves: 6

800 grams gramigna

600 grams pork sausage

1 small carrot

½ onion

½ celery rib

500 grams tomatoes, peeled

a glass of dry white wine

Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese

extra virgin olive oil

salt

Prepare a battuto with onion, celery and carrot and lightly brown in a frying pan with a little oil. In the meantime, skin the sausage, break it up in the pan, brown it for a few minutes over medium heat, mixing to combine the ingredients and pour in the wine.

Once the wine has evaporated, purée the tomatoes, pour them into the pan and simmer over low heat, covered, for one hour, checking that the sauce doesn’t get too dry and adding a little water, if necessary. Taste the sauce and season with salt.

Boil the gramigna in a large pot filled with salted water for 5 to 6 minutes, draining when al dente. Coat with the sauce and finish with a generous grating of Parmigiano-Reggiano.

Notes

As used in the above recipe, a battuto is a finely diced mixture of vegetables that, once cooked, become the flavor-base of countless Italian soups, stews and sauces. In her Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking [1992], the great Marcella Hazan writes: “At one time, the nearly invariable components of a battuto were lard, parsley, and onion, all chopped very fine.” Today, more often than not, a recipe calling for a battuto dispenses with the lard and cooks the chopped vegetables in olive oil or butter. Hazan continues: “When a battuto is sautéed in a pot or skillet until the onion becomes translucent and the garlic, if any, become colored a pale gold, it turns into a soffritto.”

When I make Gramigna al Ragù di Salsiccia, I cook the vegetables for about 10 to 15 minutes over medium-low heat. After creating the soffritto, I turn the heat up to medium to brown the crumbled sausage. I use a dry Orvieto, about 200 ml or so, to deglaze the pan.

Finally, the La Pasta recipe suggests cooking the gramigna for about 5 to 6 minutes. That time frame sounds a little too long to me. Taste the pasta as you go. I typically cook fresh gramigna for about 3 minutes after the pasta water has returned to a boil.

Gramigna

Gramigna, like toppe (here), traditionally contains a blend of durum-wheat flour, type 00 flour and eggs. In her Encyclopedia of Pasta [2009], Oretta Zanini De Vita writes that you find the fresh version of gramigna (“little weeds” in Italian) in Emilia-Romagna and in its neighboring regions of the Marche and Friuli-Venezia Giulia. Outside of Italy, the small, sprout-like shape rarely appears as fresh pasta. Even finding the dry, factory made version can prove difficult here in the states. Why seek it out? The shape has an affinity with its traditional sauce—a sausage ragù(here)—and makes a unique and deeply comforting dish. As Lynne Rossetto Kasper writes in The Splendid Table [1992], gramigna is “Emilian coming-home-to-mother food.” Who wouldn’t want to eat Bolognese comfort food?

Like many Italian pasta shapes, gramigna evolved over time. The earliest homemade version was shaped by rubbing a hard dough over a large-hole grater. Graters gave way to home pasta presses mounted on walls or tables. When extruded, the fresh homemade and dry factory versions look similar, but expect the homemade pasta to look less uniform.

Luckily, making fresh gramigna at home is remarkably easy with a torchio or other type of pasta extruder. The bronze die does all the tricky work of creating a thin, curvy tube. Emiliomiti (here) in San Francisco sells a number of gramigna dies; I use No. 138. The only real secret to making gramigna in a torchio—like most extruded shapes—lies with the dough: it must be dry or the gramigna will stick to each other when extruded and cut.

The following dough represents somewhat of a departure from other torchio dough recipes I have shared on this site. The ratio of flour to liquid for my gramigna dough is 2 to 1. This mixture starts out extremely dry and I only knead the dough for 20 seconds or so. The approach in a nutshell: mix the flour and eggs together and wrap the dough in plastic wrap to hydrate for approximately an hour. Here are the ingredients and a detailed description of the process that I use to make gramigna in a torchio.

150 grams Caputo tipo 00 flour

50 grams Giusto Extra Fancy durum flour

100 grams of a beaten egg mixture comprised of 1 medium egg and 2 medium egg yolks

1) Weigh out the flour and sift into a heavy mixing bowl.

2) Place a cup on a scale and tare the scale. Crack and add the whole egg and two egg yolks into the cup. If the eggs weigh less than 100 grams, add egg whites or water to reach a weight of 100 grams. Remove the cup from the scale and mix to blend the whole egg and egg yolks (and water, if using).

3) Make a well in the flour and add 100 grams of the egg mixture. Incorporate the mixture into the flour with the fork until a crumbly mixture forms. Clean the dough off your fork and add it to the bowl.

4) Holding the bowl with one hand, reach into the bowl with your other hand and continue to mix the dough by hand. The goal is to incorporate all of the flour in the bowl into a rough dough that holds together. (If this mixture remains too dry and will not come together, add a quick spritz or two of water from a spray bottle.)

5) Turn your dough onto a clean work surface. Knead the dough a couple of times and tightly wrap the dough in plastic wrap. Let the dough rest at room temperature for about 1 hour.

6) Attach your torchio to a work surface and insert your gramigna die. Unwrap the dough and lightly dust it with flour. Roll the dough into a thick cylinder and slide this into the torchio’s chamber. Insert the torchio’s piston into the machine’s chamber and turn the torchio’s handle until the pasta extrudes from the die. (Don’t be surprised by the amount of effort necessary to operate the press. The dough that travels through the bronze die is hard and dry.) Cut the gramigna into approximately 1½-inch long pieces and place on a baking tray covered with semolina flour. Continue turning and cutting until the dough runs out. You will have enough pasta to serve 4 as a starter or 2 to 3 as a main course.

To cook the pasta, bring a large pot of salted water to the boil. Add the fresh gramigna, stir the pasta and when the water returns to the boil, cook for approximately 3 minutes. Taste to determine if the pasta is ready. If so, drain and add the gramigna to your ready sauce, mix the two together and cook the pasta and sauce for a minute or two.

More often than not the sauce accompanying gramigna contains pork sausage. Kasper’s The Splendid Table contains a recipe for Gramigna alla Salsiccia e Vino (Gramigna with Wine-Braised Sausage). Giuliano Bugialli’s Bugialli on Pasta [1988] features a recipe for Gramigna al Sugo di Salsicce (Gramigna with Sausage-flavored Sauce). In The Geometry of Pasta [2010] Jacob Kenedy serves gramigna in a cabbage and sausage sauce made with milk and butter.  The Italian-language La Pasta [2010] from Slow Food Editore includes a recipe from Trattoria da Gianni a la Vécia Bulàgna in Bologna entitled Gramigna al Ragù di Salsiccia (here) that features—surprise—sausage. Vegetarians take heart: Zanini De Vita writes that during the summer the pasta may be cooked directly in a light (sausage-free) tomato sauce.