Pizzoccheri is what I would call a traditional northern-Italian comfort food. It’s essentially buckwheat pasta, potato, butter, cheese, cabbage, sage and garlic. It hails from the Valtellina, a valley in the Lombardia region - a bastion of blonde, fair and blue-eyed Italians who look and act more Swiss than they do like the dark and swarthy Italians of my misperceptions.
I ate pizzoccheri in the Valtellina town of Bormio, where we spent 4 days skiing, eating and sitting in thermal baths. I’d never before set foot in a ski town that in more ways than not resembled the days when the Roman Empire was … an Empire. It was spectacular and surreal.
To be precise, I actually ate the pizzoccheri (and Su something equally as heavy) for lunch at the top of the slopes. Not everyone would encourage eating a dish that has the effect of horse tranquilizer on the body while skiing. And in hindsight, I’m not sure I would either. The good news was that, as it turned out, skiing in Bormio was just sun-tanning at a slope-side restaurant with a glass of wine. Any type of vertical movement that capitalized on gravity was basically a different hobby all together and so, to the extent that Su and I recklessly guided ourselves in semi-comatose states down the mountain after that meal, we really didn’t endanger anyone but ourselves.
On a side note, Su also had the foresight to encourage me to shamelessly smuggle food back home to Toronto. I literally had small wheels of cheese stuffed into my ski boots among the dried porcinis, olive oils and wines that littered my backpack. I lost a sausage, which was en route to my dad, to American Customs but, remarkably, everything else survived the voyage to the New World.
In case my tale wasn’t clear, pizzoccheri is a fabulous, and extremely heavy, dish. This is not to deter you from making it, because you won’t regret it, but also know it’s the kind of meal I would suggest making before settling into a cozy evening of Italian beauty pageants on OMNI or your equivalent local television network, wherever in the world you may be.
THE RECIPE
My pizzoccheri recipe is a hybrid of a few I found online and my own improvisations. I looked to Mark Bittman’s recipe http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/31/dining/311mrex.html
as well as that of this lady at Delicious Days http://www.deliciousdays.com/archives/2007/02/16/pizzoccheri-della-valtellina-embracing-comfort-food
and to this one http://www.grouprecipes.com/4593/pizzoccheri-valtellinesi.html
and to this one http://fxcuisine.com/Default.asp?language=2&Display=87&resolution=high
BUCKWHEAT PASTA
Ingredients
If you check out the recipes, you’ll notice extreme mixed-messages as to the buckwheat flour-to-all purpose flour-to-water ratios. I made up my own ratio and it worked out well.
• 2 cups buckwheat flour
• 1 cup all-purpose flour
• ¾ cup warm water
Having said that, if you combine these ingredients and for some reason don't get a dough, add water until you do.
Directions
• Mix ingredients together until you get a dough
• I didn’t roll out the dough it seemed like way way way too much work. I instead flattened little balls of dough into pancakes with my fingers and threw them into the water.
• You of course are free to go the distance with a rolling pin but I was happy with the outcome.
I’m giving you a few photos of other people’s pizzoccheris so you can see what it looks like when you don’t laze-out and actually roll the pasta.
THE REST OF IT
Ingredients
• 6-12 leaves fresh sage, chopped
• Almost a full head of savoy cabbage or in hindsight a full head
• 2 small potatoes, small cubes
• 1 stick of unsalted butter
• 3 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 cup fontina cheese, grated
• 1 cup parmigiano, grated
Directions
• Boil large pot of water
• In a saucepan on low-medium heat, melt butter with sage and garlic until butter browns. Then remove from heat
• Cook the potatoes and cabbage in the boiling water about 5 minutes, add your buckwheat pasta to the same pot and boil until pasta cooked. Drain off all liquid.
• Add the pasta, cabbage and potato back to the pot and mix in the butter mixture.
• Then mix in the grated cheese.
• Mix on low heat until cheese is completely melted
• Season to taste. FYI, I didn’t add any salt because I found the cheese to be salty enough.
