All roads do not lead to Rome. If you want to get a Ph.D. in pasta, your journey must include a long stay in Bologna. This city is the culinary capital of Italy, one of the gem culinary cities of the world.
You’d need to spend time in school and in the shops. And in a pasta laboratorio, the “back” or “upstairs” room where little old ladies make pasta for the storefront. Please, “little old ladies” is a deep complement. Ultimate pasta skill comes from experience. You might think you could learn all you need to know about flour + water + salt in just a matter of hours, days at most.
No, it takes much more. For in Italy, particularly in Northern Italy, pasta is a platform for seasonal and regional flavors. Spring peas and fall rabbit have to be carefully sourced and prepped before being incorporated into complex pasta shapes or succulent sauces. Time at the stove and the pasta table is needed for the experience to mellow into expertise.
Thomas McNaugthon is the Executive Chef at Flour + Water, a renowned pasta and pizza restaurant in the Mission District of San Francisco. He has been there from the beginning in 2006 after a journey in restaurants around the United States and Europe. And, most importantly, time in Bologna. Not decades of time there. But, most clearly, enough time.
This cookbook Flour + Water: Pasta is an end run around that Ph.D. program. If you read and cook from this book, you won’t get a degree. You will get exceptional meals.
This is pasta as you have never made it before. Almost certainly pasta as you have never eaten it before. These are gargantuan recipes. Not open-the-box-boil-the-pasta-top-with-the-sauce pasta that is made in a half hour. No, these are all day recipes. A recipe here can have 20 ingredients and 10 long paragraphs of instructions. Making these recipes will demand time and patience and attention. Making these recipes will be an experience you will not forget.
We often think of Italian food as “simple,” one where a typical dish has just a handful of ingredients. And while that is often true, when it comes to pasta, the dishes can become wonderfully complex. This post ends with a picture of the Garganelli with Prosciutto and Peas. [Look for the recipe itself later this week!]. It requires a mere 19 ingredients, not the 20. Yet there is still an Italian philosophy behind this recipe. Tom notes:
… it's the kind of dish that shouldn't be tweaked too much, because it's so straightforward. Just let it float. For that same reason, buy the best ingredients you can for this dish, because simplicity often exposes the quality of your ingredients, for better and worse.
That emphasis on ingredients is a theme you see exposed on every page. Tom learned the importance of regional and seasonal in Bologna. Now, in Northern California, he lives in the center of America’s regional and seasonal food network.
After a deep dive into the techniques of making pasta, Flour + Water: Pasta provides recipes by, what else, the seasons. Here are some examples to tempt you:
- Summer
Eggplant Mezzalune with Cherry Tomatoes
Orecchiette with Rabbit Sausage and Padron Peppers
Black Pepper Tagliatelle with Mussels, Lardo, and Corn
- Autumn
Cocoa Tajarin with Brown Butter-Braised Giblets, Butternut Squash, and Sage
Pumpkin Tortelloni with Sage and Pumpkin Seeds
Wild Board Strozzapretti
- Winter
Tagliatelle Bolognese
Pappardelle with Braised Goat Shoulder, Anchovy, and Kale
Rabbit Cannelloni with Sweet Potato and Thyme
- Spring
Lemon Farfalle with Spring Pea Ragu
Asparagus Carmelle with Brown Butter and Meyer Lemon
Garganelli with Prosciutto and Peas
Some of these recipes will ring familiar to you. Some have terms, like garganelli, that are possibly new. This is a book for pasta exploration.
Many cookbooks are good. Some are great. A few are significant. If you love pasta, Flour + Water: Pasta is significant book, one that will befriend you for years. Your pasta experiences here will be long in labor and lavish in flavor.
