Orecchiette
One of my favorite books, “Honey from a Weed” by Patience Gray, echoes everything I believe about cooking: that simplicity, rooted in place and memory, is the true mark of beauty. Her time in Puglia — like mine across Southern Italy — reaffirms a truth I’ve come to hold close: “Poverty rather than wealth gives the good things of life their true significance.” She writes, “In Apulia, the landscape is unadorned, and the food even more so — but therein lies its depth. What is grown and eaten here comes not from wealth but from wisdom.”
RECIPE FOR ORECCHIETTE PASTA
Feeds Four
For the Pasta:
500g semolato rimacinato di grano duro, preferably Molini del Ponte
250g water, lukewarm
Prepare the dough. Using the traditional method, dump the semola onto a clean work surface. Using two fingers create a well in the middle and slowly add the warm water. Using a fork gradually incorporate the flour into the water, moving towards using your hands to get the dough together. You can add more water as needed, sometimes flour is dryer in certain months, but you do not want a tacky wet dough, a smooth playdough like is the ideal scenario.
Knead the dough for at least 15 minutes. When you make an indent in the dough using a finger and it bounces back then the dough will tell you you're finished kneading.
Let the dough rest under a damp cloth for at least 15 minutes.
Cut the dough into six equal parts.
Starting from the center, slowly start to roll the dough out into a long coil, applying pressure evenly throughout the process. If one part gets too skinny, you can always redo it, or cut smaller pieces from the original mass and move at a speed that is more your style.
Once you achieve a long coil, approximately 18" or so, cut ½" squares.
With a very dull serrated dinner knife, place it on top of one of the cut squares at a 30* angle.
I am right handed, so using my left hand, I hold the piece of pasta while using my right index finger to evenly apply pressure to the knife, pulling towards myself evenly, not downwards or upwards, until the dough starts to coil back on itself. Using my right index finger I slightly invert it with little pressure upwards to create more of a dome, or the undeniable "little ear" shape.
Continue this process until you don't have any dough left.
Lightly dust a sheet tray with semolina flour and let the orecchiette dry for at least an hour in direct sunlight.
This dish — a tangle of spinach, dandelion, and Swiss chard, slowly cooked with garlic and chili until melting and tender — is just that. Finished with lemon zest, juice, and a generous dusting of pecorino, it’s one of my favorite pastas of all time. Humble, bold, and unmistakably easy.
For the accompaniment:
1 bunch wild dandelion, local rainbow swiss chard & spinach
2 garlic cloves, germ removed and thinly sliced
1 pinch of peperoncino
1 lemon, juiced & zested
8 oz white wine, preferably from Puglia or Southern Italy such as Verdeca or Greco
Extra Virgin Olive Oil, preferably of Pugliese decent
Fine Sea Salt
Pecorino, preferably older than 3 months
