Recipe: Homemade spelt pasta made two ways

We’ve made our pasta dinners more interesting with these two recipes for homemade whole-grain spelt pasta. We’ve been wanting to experiment with making pasta with new ingredients and a trip to a farmer’s market provided just the opportunity. We picked up fresh milled (just a few days before) organic whole-grain spelt flour sold by CIPM Farm in Hastings County, Ontario. Now was our chance to be completely Italian by making really fresh food with fresh ingredients and make it with a purely Canadian product.

Spelt is an “ancient” grain and the starch in it is more soluble than regular wheat, so recipes using spelt generally require less water and produce a denser product. There aren’t too many recipes out there online for making spelt pasta (while there are plenty of videos of Nonnas teaching others how to make pasta, they don’t use spelt!), particularly whole grain spelt. So we had to try some experiments and come up with our own. Here’s two highly-recommended recipes for making spelt pasta – one using just water, the other using eggs.

Spelt pasta made with water
500g whole-grain spelt flour
1 cup warm water
1/2 teaspoon salt

Place flour on working surface, making a well in the middle. Carefully pour water and add salt into the well and begin to mix in the flour with a fork, slowly gathering the flour from the sides of of the well and being careful not to break the walls of flour. Mix until the dough begins to come together then work the dough by hand, adding flour as needed, until the dough is smooth. Form into a ball and wrap in plastic. Let rest at least one hour.

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Recipe: Pasta con fagioli e salsiccia

It’s sausage season (that’s January and February to the uninitiated) and there’s always a few sausages that break and really should be used immediately. And really no one minds, because no matter how you prepare it, fresh ingredients taste great. Here’s what we had this week: it’s quick, easy, and makes you wish there were more left overs (this recipe should feed four).

Pasta with beans and sausage / Pasta con fagioli e salsiccia

2 cups dry pasta (penne work best, but that’s just my opinion)
1 fresh sausage link (7 oz of ground pork meat, cured with salt, hot peppers and red pepper paste)
1 medium potato
1 medium onion
6 oz romano beans
olive oil
grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese to taste

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Recipe: Pasta Rapini

This slightly-soupy rapini pasta comes from my father’s hometown of Monteleone in the region of Puglia. We first had it when we visited there, driving in from my mom’s hometown in Calabria. Coming up from the south to the higher altitudes put a chill in our beach-braised bodies and our relatives welcomed us with a warming bowl of pasta rapini. We’ve made it quite frequently ever since, especially during the cold winters here in Canada. I have not been surprised to find similar recipes in some cookbooks, including the Silver Spoon. For your reference, rapini also go by the fancier name “broccoli rabe.”

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Cooking Sunday

It was cooking/baking Sunday on the weekend! What you are looking at is pasta dough, gnocchi dough and canoli dough. Which is which?