We’ve been making all kinds of creative pasta lately, with unusual ingredient lists, playful dough colourings, and fiddly shapes. Well, this week we’re going back to basics, and cooking up a crowd-pleasing carbonara. To add a little Pasta et Al spin, we’ve made our tonnarelli with half rye flour, and smoked it briefly before tossing it through the sauce. It’s a creamy, cheesy, smoky smile-bringer.

It’s time to go back to basics, and it doesn’t get much simpler than flour, water, and onions. This week we’re tapping into our roots with the perfectly imperfect Calabrese fileja. Although we make all kinds of pasta these days, and tend to use egg doughs more often than not, a lot of the pasta that we made and ate growing up was just flour and water. In fact, most of the food that we enjoyed was really cucina povera, imported to Australia relatively unchanged from how it was cooked by generations before us back in Italy. For me, something about that connection always makes these dishes a little special.

This week it’s back to our favourite type of pasta: ravioli! You might remember our spinach and ricotta recipe, from way back in the early days of our blog. That was our original family dish, but we also use to make the occasional meat or pumpkin filled variety, which is what’s inspired this week’s pasta. A simple but satisfying mix of earthy dough, creamy filling, and crispy little bits of meat!

Farfalle are a much maligned pasta. I suppose that they’re easy to dismiss as a bit of a novelty, little butterflies that are stocked in most supermarkets, beloved to children, comfort food to adults. Often featuring in horrid cold salads. But when I look at farfalle I see textures: smooth expanses with ruffled edges, ridged hollows that hold sauce, an extra firm pinch in the middle to contrast with the softer bite of the flat sides.