HOW TO MAKE ITALIAN PASTA IN TUSCANY
The homemade pasta at La Bruciata is an ancient Italian tradition that combines a few simple ingredients with the expertly skilled hands
of the women who have always lived here in Tuscany. If like us, your passion is homemade Italian pasta, then you are in the right place. Here you can learn about the different types of handcrafted pasta from traditional recipes in Tuscany.
You will begin by using our farm fresh eggs and flour ground from the wheat of Val d’Orcia, to which we’ll add salt and our own extra virgin olive oil. And then you’ll start to knead. This is our dough that we’ll roll out with a traditional rolling pin called a mattarello that is over a meter long! It is a real art to achieve the perfect dough consistency that has depth when using only eggs and flour and no water. Depending on what type of pasta we want, we will next cut the dough—for pappardelle the strips will be about two centimeters (see recipe: pappardelle with wild boar) or noodles, or tagliatini (see recipe: tagliatini with chickpeas ), or even stuffed pasta like ravioli to which we add spinach and locally sourced ricotta from the Val d’Orcia, or baked pasta made with a meat ragù or even homemade cappelletti famous in this part of Tuscany to be cooked in a broth of “galantina,” a chicken stuffed with various meats. For the gourmet, the possibilities are endless!
Simplicity and authenticity are two of the most important characteristics in our cuisine, which embraces the secrets and methods that our grandmothers have taught us and handed down for generations. And now we can share these with you, starting with knowledge of the ingredients, the type of flour used, and the way to recognize the difference and quality of basic ingredients. Often our guests ask us the difference between one flour and another and because of our experience we can explain when and why one is preferable. At the supermarket you’ll find many types of flour, often very refined because the tendency is to use flours that do not require much processing or leavening time and are easy to store a long time. However, these types of refined flours are nutritionally poor and have a very high glycemic index because the bran and wheat germ has been removed.
We look forward to sharing with you our traditions and to giving you a glimpse of the secrets that only a family who has lived in Tuscany for generations can convey with a passion for Tuscan cuisine.