Disclaimer: Our new pettine comes from our generous friend The Coastal Italian. We use and love everything that we recommend on our blog, and hope that you will too!
The Story
Spinach and ricotta was really my Nonna’s trademark pasta filling, stuffed generously into huge batches of ravioli and cannelloni. With a little Romano cheese, maybe some minced garlic, egg to bind it all, and salt and pepper. Simple perfection, and to this day my favourite filling. Well, this week, we’re turning things inside out.
With the help of our gorgeous new pettine, we’re making garganelli, and tossing it through a sauce that we’ve based on Nonna’s filling: chicory and spinach chopped through fresh ricotta, with lemon zest to lift it.
And because we like a little creativity in our pasta, we’ve added sumac to our dough. Sumac might not spring to mind as a quintessentially Italian ingredient, but in our southern neck of the woods (or rather our variously Mediterranean and semi-arid Mezzogiorno) it grows all over the place. With southern Italian cooking so heavily influenced by Arabic cuisine, its citrusy, tart acidity pairs well with so many other regional flavours, and of course with our lemony ricotta sauce.
So grab yourself the freshest ricotta that you can find, and a pettine or gnocchi board to form those grooves, and let’s get into it.
The Pasta
We’re so happy to have recently been gifted this beautiful pettine from our pal The Coastal Italian. These wonderful pasta tools are traditionally crafted from antique loom combs, with this one reclaimed and restored by Al Marangoun aka Marco Galavotti from the combs of a craftsman working in Reggio-Emilia more than 100 years ago. Now, of course if you don’t have a pettine you can use a gnocchi board or cavarola, but if you’re all out of hand-crafted wooden pasta tools: arrangiarsi! By which I mean that we once rolled garganelli out on a (thoroughly cleaned) wicker chair at the family holiday house…
This dough starts like all good doughs, with a flour well and eggs in the middle. We’ve gone for a classic 100g flour plus one egg per person, with a mix of plain flour and semolina for a slightly firmer pasta. Add in your sumac, mix it all up, and give it a knead for 10 minutes before resting for 30. Don’t forget to hide it away from sun and heat. Thanks to a sunny house and an Aussie summer, our dough ends up in all kinds of weird places around this time of the year. On a chair under the table, behind the fruit bowl, in the tea towel drawer. Now that I write this it occurs to me that I could just use a cupboard.
Roll your dough out and cut it into squares of about 4cm, then arm yourself with a dowel. For 4cm squares, a diameter of 1cm should be about right.
Working one at a time, set the squares at a 45-degree angle to the dowel (like a diamond), wrapping and overlapping two opposing corners. Then apply light pressure and roll towards you to form the indentations and set the pasta into a tube. Transfer to lightly floured baking paper, and refrigerate uncovered for 1-3 days.
Note that we prevent our garganelli from going flat by turning them on their sides once after they’ve air-dried for 5-10 minutes. As long as they haven’t dried out too much, you should be able to then give them a little poke to encourage them back open.
For the sauce, boil the chicory for 10 minutes and then fry it gently with the spinach and garlic. If this is your first time cooking chicory, wash it thoroughly, wash it again, give it a shake, and then wash it once more to ensure that you’ve evicted all ‘passeggeri’, as my Ma calls them.
Add all other sauce ingredients into the pan, and use a fork to smooth out the ricotta. Then once your pasta is cooked, stir it straight into the sauce, adding a little pasta water to help with emulsification. Serve with a crack of pepper!
That’s all there is to it. A nice simple sauce, with a simple pasta (that looks a bit fancy).
Happy Sunday and buon appetito!
– Al & Al & El.
Equipment
- Pettine (alternatively, use a cavarola or gnocchi board)
Ingredients
Pasta
- 320 g plain flour
- 80 g semolina
- 4 eggs
- 10 g sumac
Sauce
- 120 g chicory chopped
- 120 g spinach chopped
- 2 +1 tbsp olive oil extra virgin
- 2 cloves garlic chopped
- 320 g ricotta
- 20 g pecorino Romano
- 1 lemon zest only
- Salt and pepper to taste
Instructions
- Form a well with the flour, semolina, and sumac, and then add the eggs into the centre. Bring together using a fork, and then knead vigorously for 10 minutes. Seal in cling wrap and rest for 30 minutes, away from heat and direct sunlight.
- Using a pasta machine, roll the dough through on the thickest setting 2-3 times, folding over itself in between passes. Then step up incrementally to a medium-thin thickness, 5-6 on a 9-setting machine.
- Cut the sheets into squares of about 4cm in diameter, then wrap each around a piece of 1cm diameter dowel, offset into a diamond alignment. Overlap two opposing corners, and then roll towards you across your pettine or gnocchi board. This will seal the pasta into a tube while forming its ridges. Transfer to lightly floured baking paper, and refrigerate uncovered for 1-3 days.
- Bring a large pot of lightly salted water to a vigorous boil, and then cook the chicory for 10 minutes. Remove and drain, retaining the water.
- Add chicory and spinach to a medium heat pan, with 1 tbsp of olive oil and the garlic. Fry gently for 5 minutes, and then remove pan from the heat.
- Allow the greens to cool while you cook the pasta, boiling on high heat for 5-6 minutes or until no raw (white) dough is visible when the dough is cut into. Drain the pasta, retaining around 1/2 cup of pasta water.
- Use a fork to combine the ricotta, Romano cheese, 2 tbsp of olive oil, and lemon zest in a bowl, season to taste, and then add directly into the pan with the greens and the pasta. The residual heat will help combine the cheese. Toss together thoroughly, adding a little pasta water if necessary to assist emulsification. Serve with a crack of pepper.
