Flour + Water: Pasta [A Cookbook] - Hardcover

McNaughton, Thomas; Lucchesi, Paolo

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1607744708 ISBN 13: 9781607744702

Verlag: Ten Speed Press, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

An elevated guide to the craft of pasta-making by rising star chef Thomas McNaughton of San Francisco's hottest Italian restaurant, flour + water.

Chef Thomas McNaughton shares his time-tested secrets to creating simple, delicious, and beautiful artisan pasta—from the best fresh doughs to shaping and cooking every type of pasta. A true celebration of Italy’s pasta traditions, flour + water includes fifty seasonally influenced recipes for home cooks of every skill level. The recipes cover the flavor spectrum from well-loved classics to inventive combinations, such as Tagliatelle Bolognese; Pumpkin Tortelloni with Sage and Pumpkin Seeds; Tomato Farfalle with Chicken Polpettine, Roasted Peppers, and Basil; and Asparagus Caramelle with Brown Butter. With guidance from McNaughton and the secrets of flour + water’s dough room, anyone can learn to make amazing pasta at home.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

THOMAS MCNAUGHTON is the executive chef and co-owner of flour + water, Central Kitchen, and Salumeria in San Francisco. He has worked at some of the most respected restaurants in San Francisco, including La Folie, Gary Danko, and Quince. He has twice been nominated for Rising Star Chef of the Year by the James Beard Foundation.

PAOLO LUCCHESI is a reporter and columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. Born and raised in South San Francisco, he was the founding editor for Eater San Francisco and Eater National, and has written for Food & Wine, Saveur, and McSweeney’s, among others.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

San Francisco's flour + water has a devoted local following, a strong national reputation, and is well known for its specialty regional pasta varieties, all-Italian wine program, and star chef Thomas McNaughton. McNaughton is an artisan truly passionate about pasta whose inventive recipes and fresh flavor combinations-such as Corn and Crescenza Cappelletti with Bitter Honey; Spaghetti with Confit Albacore, Pole beans and Chili Flakes; and Asparagus Caramelle with Brown Butter-set Flour + Water apart from other pasta books. The 75 recipes are organized seasonally, and appeal to all pasta-lovers, from those who've never made it themselves to weekend warriors looking for their next challenge. Steeped in Italian tradition with a chef's flair, Flour + Water is a must-have for all home pasta-makers.

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Introduction:
From Bologna to San Francisco

Pasta is woven into the cultural fabric of Italy—it pretty much is culture in Italy—but it holds a particularly high place in the hierarchy in Bologna. It was there that I fell in love with pasta—and where I really learned to make pasta.

The dominance of pasta in Bologna is evident within minutes of walking around the city. Just like taquerias inhabit every corner of the Mission in San Francisco, and the neon signs of pizza-by-the-slice joints light up Manhattan neighborhoods, so does fresh pasta rule the windows of Bologna markets. Sold by weight or by the bundle, fresh pasta is inescapable there. It comes in a rainbow of dough colors, and in all sizes, though you can be assured every shop proudly displays the requisite pasta signature of Bologna: nickel-sized tortellini. You might even see old ladies in the window, rolling out fresh pasta for tourist passersby. 
But as someone once told me, Italy is “under the table.” In other words, to really, truly understand the essence of anything in Italy, you have to look a little harder, immerse yourself, and start to peel back the layers. Look past the Disneyland-like gloss of touristy restaurants in the city center with the overpriced microwaved tagliatelle Bolognese. Instead, seek out the under-the-radar olive grove in the countryside that has quietly been making oil in the same way for decades, or the hobbyist miller who taught himself how to produce the best flour in the area. Or see it in the the pair of young brothers at Zavoli Farms who are single-handedly maintaining tradition by raising indigenous heritage breed pigs in the easternmost, sun-kissed hills of Emilia-Romagna while pushing forward by experimenting with new techniques for making salumi.

As it happens, my “under the table” moment in Bologna actually took place above its streets. Having found myself in Italy looking for a change of pace from the fine dining kitchens of San Francisco, France, and Germany, I met a gregarious Bolognese native named Marcello via John Pauley, a chef I met while working at La Folie in San Francisco. Marcello had an available room in Bologna. Once he found out I was a cook looking to learn about Italian cuisine, he wasted no time in referring me to a place that would change the course of my career: Bruno e Franco la Salumeria. 

The salumeria itself is glorious, its shelves stocked with jars of vibrant green olives, giant wheels of pungent cheese, and myriad cured pork products, all procured from the best in the region. Across the street is a little second-story room overlooking the salumeria. The street-level entrance is completely unmarked save for a hidden little buzzer. You wouldn’t find it if you weren’t looking for it; it cryptically reads “Laboratorio.” 

Up a narrow flight of stairs lies the salumeria’s pasta “laboratory”—a small workshop consisting of a few tables and little else. It’s where all the fresh pasta sold in the salumeria is made. In old-school Bologna, the laboratorio and the salumeria have a symbiotic relationship; one exclusively makes the product and the other exclusively sells it. Compared to the splendor of the salumeria, the pasta lab room is incredibly bare bones, and despite the name, there’s nothing scientific or laboratory-like about the place. It is more like a glimpse into the past. 

Inside, there are a dozen Italian ladies of all ages dressed in pastel pink chef coats, making fresh pasta in the same way they did the day before, and the day before that, and the day before that. They only make a handful of pasta types: Bologna’s sacred tortellini are the most prolific output of the room. Rounding out the day’s work are batches of tagliatelle, passatelli, paglia e fieno (straw and hay), Roman-style gnocchi, and finally, depending on the day, maybe a few orders of ready-to-bake cannelloni. The entire day’s production will sell out downstairs in the salumeria, and it will be restocked the next day.

Spanning several generations, the women themselves are the tableau of Bologna, and of Italy. Some of them come from an older generation, the generation that grew up in the war-ravaged years of the 1940s and 1950s, when food was scarce. They speak softly with an air of authority, often drifting off into dialect, basically acting like the Italian nonna you always imagined, telling winding anecdotes and politely answering your dumb question in that old, Italian matter-of-fact way that makes the question seem even dumber. Other ladies are younger. Some came from other careers; some have known nothing but pasta making. Some are natives of Bologna; some moved here from elsewhere in Italy. The ones from the south, for example, spark arguments about which region’s cuisine is better. Whatever their origins, they all tell bawdy jokes, they gossip about town, they smoke in the bathroom during breaks. Many are mothers, since a job making pasta is amenable to family life. Their workday starts at dawn, allowing them to leave in time to pick up the children from school. 
They are all wonderful and charismatic characters in a marvelous play. 
Varying personalities aside, the women are all united through their work at the pasta laboratorio, where they work as a single, perfectly functioning unit. One rocks back and forth as she rolls out sheet after sheet of fresh handmade pasta dough with her mattarello, a long wooden Bolognese rolling pin. The women use matarelli made especially for the laboratorio by a blind woodworker down the block; mechanical pasta machines are frowned upon, to say the least. Another woman is mixing gnocchi dough by hand in the corner, while a third, working at the window, wields a weathered knife to precisely slice pasta dough into the uniform shreds of tagliatelle. 


The rest of the ladies hover around a table near the entrance, methodically forming the day’s worth of tortellini to be sold downstairs. While they twist the circular shapes, their constant chatter fills the room. The pasta lab is a time capsule—a fully functioning preservation of Bolognese culture and tradition.

It is true craftsmanship. There are no assigned jobs, but each woman floats from one table to the next. Maybe the youngest one—or the one who came to work late that day—will get stuck making the cannelloni; forming the filled pasta is the messy, labor-intensive job that no one else wants to do. The voices of the ladies barely overshadow the rhythmic, dull sounds of the rolling pin slowly doing its dance, stretching the pasta dough over the wooden table, forming their sfoglia—the sheet of fresh pasta dough. When the dough is completely flattened into a massive, imprecise four-foot-wide sheet, it is slid over to another table, where the tortellini are formed by other ladies. 

Every hour or so, the teenage kid from the downstairs salumeria arrives to take a few trays of pasta down to the salumeria, looking at me and gently sighing how glad he is that he didn’t
have to be the only guy upstairs in the lab anymore. He confesses, in his broken English, that he felt uncomfortable when the ladies would discuss, as he put it, “feminine topics.” He smiles and takes the trays of pasta downstairs to the display case. 

I found myself in the pasta lab by chance, and I stayed for months. The ladies became family, though I’m pretty sure they made fun of my Italian language skills (or lack thereof). After working as a fine dining soldier for years, I felt myself yearning for a change, for something more soulful, more personal. I found it in the unlikeliest of laboratories,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Ten Speed Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1607744708
• ISBN 13: 9781607744702
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 288
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland