Comments on: Peculiar Pastas #2

By: Launching 2022 Dinners – SaltShaker

Launching 2022 Dinners – SaltShaker — Sun, 09 Jan 2022 16:50:32 +0000

[…] Roasted Carrots, Shishitos, and Hazelnuts – Stradette are a “peculiar pasta” that I’ve explored in a past post, and in numerous dinners since. It’s a pasta made from a mix of polenta and flour, in this […]

By: Peculiar Pastas #9

Peculiar Pastas #9 — Wed, 13 Jun 2018 14:34:31 +0000

[…] like the very first in this series… grano arso, made with “burnt flour”, or stradette, made with corn flour. These are ravioli della val pusteria, and the secret of the color… […]

By: dan

dan — Sat, 25 Nov 2017 12:18:07 +0000

In reply to Rich. Rich, that sounds delicious! I've got to give that a try. Thanks!

By: Rich

Rich — Fri, 24 Nov 2017 23:19:23 +0000

My grandmother also cut sradette into triangles which she called costellette. We cook them in boiling water, pour off about half the water, and add a pan full of Italian sausage (no casing) fried with a little garlic and parsley (fat and all.) The bench flour on the pasta helps thicken the mixture into a sausage soup. Add some grated pecorino and the winter blues disappear!

By: Mary Lynn

Mary Lynn — Sat, 08 Apr 2017 21:47:34 +0000

My Italian nonna made a flour/cornmeal pasta. The dough was rolled flat and hand cut into fairly large diamond shapes. She served with tomato sauce and liberal handfulls of parmesan. Heaven!

By: dan

dan — Sun, 29 May 2016 12:02:58 +0000

More experimenting and, it turns out that using instant, fine polenta works beautifully. Combining that and using fewer whole eggs and more yolks, yields a beautiful, soft, supple dough with a great color (it's not quite as yellow as in the photo, where the cooked pasta is coated with a roasted carrot puree). I did find that the corn flavor is less pronounced, so I upped the ratio of polenta to semolina to 1:2 instead of 1:3 like with the cornmeal. That means less gluten to help with structure, so I also had to add in a little extra gluten to get it to hold together well. In the end, my recipe is 1 cup instant polenta, 2 cups fine semolina flour, 1 Tb pure gluten, 1/4 tsp salt, 1 whole egg, 4 egg yolks, and enough water to get it to come together into a soft, pliable dough (roughly 75-100ml - it will depend on your polenta, semolina, and humidity where you're making it). When first mixed it sort of has the texture of baguette dough, or slightly melted marshmallow, which seems really soft, but it takes the polenta and semolina a little longer to hydrate than flour does, and by the time the dough rests for 30 minutes before rolling it out, it's a perfect texture. Here, we served it with roasted carrot puree, smoked balsamic-fig reduction, brussels sprout leaves, and ají limos (local chilies).