Trenette Genovese

I’m on a quest to make all of the different types of pasta that I can at home. Coincidentally one of my favorite summer dishes is Trenette Genovese that I discovered in Mario’s Molto Italiano a few years back; it’s a Ligurian dish of pasta, pesto, potatoes, and green beans. Already having made some pesto earlier in the week, I had at hand some small potatoes from my farm share and thought I had some snap peas from the farmers market to subsitute for the green beans. Turns out they were shelling peas! Oh well, I used them anyway with good results. I ended up with the alliterative dish of Pasta with Pesto, Peas, and Potatoes.

I’m discovering that there is not a lot of information on how to make various types of pasta. Pasta dough recipes flourish, but instructions on making the shapes are elusive. Trenette is a narrow flat pasta similar to linguine. I decided to try my hand at hand cut noodles. After making the dough by hand and letting it rest, I used the Kitchen Aid attachment to roll out the dough to pretty thin sheets. I dusted them generously with semolina and folded them loosely before cutting into strips with my largest knife. The trick was not letting the humid kitchen make the dough stick together.

Then it was a simple matter of boiling the water and throwing in the potatoes first. I decided it would be simpler to boil everything together. I waited until the potatoes were close to done, threw in the pasta for a minute or two and added the peas, which just needed a minute themselves. Drained it all and added pesto and of course some parmesan on top. The picture above is of the finished dish. It was delicious last night and tasted great served cold for my lunch today!