Italian Alpine Buckwheat Pasta Pizzocheri

Members of the buckwheat cult love its strong, earthy flavor. A grain that grows on the poorest of soils. Yesterday I milled my own buckwheat flour using my brand-new Austrian flour mill. It took it less than 4 minutes to turn raw buckwheat grains (photo) into fresh flour (photo). 4 minutes before, I thought home-milling was for survivalists and food fakirs, but when I saw the beautiful fresh flour come out of the mill, I was hooked. The one to serve the Kool Aid on home milling was Paul Bertolli, former executive chef of Chez Panisse. Home milling is for gourmets. You can even buy grain mills on Amazon.com nowadays.

Pizzocheri
Traditional Italian buckwheat pasta
400 gr buckwheat flour
150 gr semolina flour
lukewarm water
150 gr parmesan
200 gr fontina, the sweetest you find
12 sage leaves or 5 cloves garlic
100 gr butter
1 green cabbage

Buckwheat makes a weak flour. There is just no gluten, so if you don't add any extra flour, instead of turning into an elastic paste, your dough will break and tear. Making noodles out of pure buckwheat flour would be like mixing sand with water and expecting to make rubber bands. As per the Italian recipe, I added 150 gr durum wheat semolina to the 450 gr buckwheat flour. You cannot make 'white' flour at home so the semolina was bought. I sifted both flours together to mix them thoroughly and to remove the tiny bits of buckwheat bran that would look ugly on the noodles.

Mix in lukewarm water and knead until you obtain a wet but non-sticky dough. Let it rest for at least 0 minutes so the water will hydrate every last grain.

Bring the dough together in a ball. It looks like wet sand but the most exquisite smell of freshly milled buckwheat. The sobatician would frown if he saw the crevices in my dough. Japanese soba chefs have a way of making dough balls as smooth as a watermelon.

Carefully flatten the dough with a long rolling pin, making sure not to break the dough with a sudden movement. This dough is definitely not elastic and if it breaks, you'll be left with half noodles. A marble or wood bench would be better but I had to make do with stainless steel. It sticks a little even with the semolina flour I sprinkled generously.

Continue to flatten the dough until you reach a thickness of 1.5 to 3 mm, depending on how brave you feel. Thinner noodles are more chic but a hell to work with. My traditional Italian recipes called for 3 mm thick pizzocheri, I find this a bit thick. These are definitely a humble relation of the soba noodles. Indeed, soba chefs use an elaborate two-pins technique to spread the dough in a rectangular shape.

Sprinkle some more flour on the stretched dough and roll it carefully until you have a manageable roll. Here using my impressive Japanese soba knife I cut the pizzocheri in the shape of fettucine. Normally people cut them in 2x6cm rectangles, but here I tried to make them as long as possible.

Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil and immerse the pizzocheri. Boil until cooked through. It took me about 4 minutes but the time very much depends on their thickness. Just taste one every 30 seconds.

When the pasta is cooked through, remove the pizzocheri with a large slotted spoon. Use the same boiling water to boil the cabbage leaves until they are soft, about 8 minutes.

Meanwhile, melt the butter and cook on a low flame with the sage leaves. Other recipes call for crushed garlic which you let brown in the butter before discarding. Others yet use both.

Assemble the dish in a warm pan or pot. Start wiht a layer of pizzocheri, then cabbage leaves, freshly grated parmesan cheese and little pieces of fontina. Then start again with another layer of pizzocheri and so on until you run out of ingredients.

Pour the melted butter over the pasta. The original recipe called for 500 gr melted butter but I don't think anybody can eat that much fat on top of the 500 gr fontina and 150 gr parmesan in the 21st century.

The dish is excellent but for one who loves the flavor of buckwheat, we are far from the glorification of that flavor offered by soba noodles. Here the point is to use a grain that can grow in the most inhospitable Alpine fields. A variation of this traditional recipe adds boiled potatoes peeld and cut.

I apologize to the reader for having cut my pizzocheri much longer than normal. If it is any consolation to you, some failed to unfold and fused into pizzocheri triple deckers as you can see on the picture above. I recommend you cut them in 2x6cm/1''x2.5'' rectangles.

For this and other handmade pasta recipe using freshly milled flour, have a look at Paul Bertoli's amazing book, Cooking by hand. This American book really changed my way of cooking pasta, and - this ought to tell you something - I have about 3 meters of Italian-language cookbooks.