How do the old Italian grannies know how to do this kind of stuff? There’s no special trick to it, just years and years of practice. They say that in some small towns, mothers would judge a potential daughter-in-law based on whether she had a good callus on her thumb. Work with pasta that long, you’re bound to get better at it. But there’s a lot of trial and a lot of errors.

For example.

This was our second attempt at trenette, the Genoese pasta traditionally served with potatoes, green beans, and pesto. Based on Giuliano Bugiali’s instructions, we’d adjusted our dough to include a mix of whole wheat and 00 white flours, rolled it thinner than last time, and gotten a crinkled roller to cut just one side of each noodle. We also decreased the amount of garlic in our pesto, which we made with basil from our porch.

It was hot and humid in our kitchen, so even sprinkled liberally with semolina, the ultra-thin noodles stuck together when piled in little nests. We hung them to rest on wire coat hangers instead, which worked pretty well. We cut up potatoes and green beans from our farm share, and boiled an enormous pot of salted water. The potatoes took about six minutes to cook. The green beans took about two minutes. We figured the pasta would take one or two.

Being that thin and that fresh, they took about thirty seconds to cook. And removing each strand of pasta off a coat hanger and putting it into the water took more than a minute. In other words, after an entire afternoon of cooking, we had mushy pasta.

Delicious, perfectly-sauced, mushy pasta.

Another thirty or sixty years of practice and we’ll wonder how anyone could find this difficult.

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!