Italy’s rarest pasta
bbc.com
bbc.com
Now I'm super curious about it, but the preparation in sheep broth and pecorino is one of the best combinations to have with pasta IMHO, very promising.
Btw if you've never been to Sardinia make sure you visit at least once in life, you won't regret it :)
Anyway, I doubt it is close enough to Latin to be mutually intelligible, as all modern Romance languages are derived from Vulgar Latin, which is known to be very different form the written Classical Latin.
I would say that it still lack many Latin features (for example cases, neutral gender), and sentence construction is generally different enough that native speaker wouldn't have a significant advantage to other romance language speakers.
Also worth noting there are different dialects of Sardo (such as Logudorese, in the north, if I remember the name correctly). And some dialects are closer to Latin than others.
In Italy/Sardinia dialects can be so far apart from one another that it's difficult to understand one another.
[0]http://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/php/English_list.php
I don't think that's quite right: Welsh is a Gaelic language and English is Germanic, so they're from different families, while Sardinian & Italian are much more closely related.
http://www.ayecan.com/read_scots/burns_museum.html
> Though his position in society wis ower laich for him tae hae the richt tae vote, Robert wis nanetheless passionate aboot politics and made his writin desk his ballot box. Scunnerin the weel-daein and pooerfu, hooanever could prove a fykie business.
> Robert Burns loved the lassies. He fell in love aften an wi ease, and wi mony weemun frae a wheen o backgrunds. The wey he treatit his lovers wis different ilka time, and ilka relationship affected Robert in its ain weys.
BTW Sardo is actually not one language, but a set of languages spoken in the island.
So I would say that "modern" Sardo (defining the "old" as the first written texts some centuries ago) it's close enough to Latin to see where every word comes from, but definitely too far to give you understanding.
I can understand Spanish though :) (context: we've been in the Spanish Kingdom for like 400 years, and the language have been influenced a lot, many shared words.)
I can understand them though, but mostly because I know Italian. (Romansh also sounds to me somewhat Portuguese and Slavic at the same time, it's a very cool language).
I guess the statement about "closeness" comes from the study (Pei, Mario 1949) referenced in the Wikipedia page about Sardinian language that somehow developed a metric and tested several languages against their parent one. Apparently Sardo has the lowest distance from Latin among Romance languages.
On a more practical side, I speak Sardo and studied Latin in high school. I cannot easily read Latin texts without a dictionary at hand and a little grammar review. I guess their similarity arises when you compare the written languages but most of us experience Sardo as a spoken-only language and many find it difficult to follow in written form. On the contrary we experience Latin as a written only language. Who knows, probably it would be a lot easier for us to understand spoken Latin.
And don't get me started on written versus spoken! Then again, my dad's dialect might look like Welsh if anyone thought to write it down. But on my mom's side, Zeneize does have a sort-of official written form, and if I read carefully I sometimes have an idea of what's going on :)
Beyond that, it frankly just "looks" a bit more latin, with s's at the end of words for plurals, and more u's than Italian has.
I think it also has fewer loan words, and has staid in some cases closer to older Latin words: 'domu' for house rather than 'casa'.
https://flavourjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/20...
Also, this is made with semolina flour, which is different (and much better IMHO) from the flour used to make pasta usually (in Italy and in the rest of the world).
(For those confused with the terminology: Both come from durum wheat, but semolina is milled more coarsely from the bran, whereas durum flour is everything else, milled to a finer flour.
I got confused with the terminology, apparently my brain doesn't work well when trying to speak three languages at the same time :)
I'm not in Italy but in China. 'Lamian' or literally 'pulled noodles' are a staple dish for my own and colleagues lunches on most days. Staples in North China are largely wheat or corn based.
Dough is usually pre-kneaded to the consistency the chef prefers. 'Cut' is then done by pulling, doubling-up, re-pulling, etc, until reaching the right thickness that the stand desires.
The article mentions su filindeu as being thin and stretched, with drying into a web-like layered structure. This is certainly going to be interesting and a bit different.
But this process of pulling and cutting varies chef-by-chef. Arguments break out a lunch between colleagues who prefer 'thin' noodles vs 'regular' vs 'think'. Going to a single place and ordering a preference just doesn't work. 'thin' where a chef makes the dough thick may be thin in diameter, but not in mouth texture. 'thick' (or wide and thick) in a restaurant that provides regular or thinly kneaded dough just doesn't feel satisfyingly chewy in a restaurant that doesn't routinely serve a thicker dough - not enough chew.
And then there's the flour used.
The difference that technique brings is huge. Liken it to bread: flour with a consistent level of ¬14-15g of protein (similar to flour used for pasta, though usually different type) per 100g can result in remarkably different breads depending on kneading, resting, forming, and remarkably more techniques.
US keyboard in UK mode, pressing the key marked ~ resulted in ¬.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaeyFyQemDw
Basically, Ramsay (not really a slouch at cooking) is trying to make lamain and he's getting a huge bitching out by the existing chef who tell him it's going to take him ten years to get good at it.
I think this video is a good counterpoint to when Ramsay is outclassed, knows it, and is respectful.
That's my favorite kind of noodle, and it's hard to find in the states in general, as it takes a long time to get good at it and you generally don't batch make the noodles.
Think about it - this is so incredibly sensitive to the exact consistency of the pasta dough, it must change by temperature, humidity, time of day, barometric pressure... to make it work, she just has to feel the pasta, to know pasta in a way that can only be done with years of manual effort.
That's why they can't build a machine to do it. They can't control the conditions well enough.
She has three listed ingredients, however I am curious how much perspiration is in the final product, surely her hands impart something through the skin contact.
Finally the drying process would have its own effect, after preparing it how much of a difference is there between it and another pasta? What exactly do they consider the differences? Is it purely texture, if so then just the preparation of the final dish can affect what you will perceive
What you're talking about is the result of the reductionist intellectual tradition. And it's been fantastic at many things - it built our modern world. But it cannot solve every problem. Not everything humans do can be reduced to simple measurement and process.
Edit: why is this at -3? You guys are assholes.
[0] www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01gns25
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> BBC WORLDWIDE IS THE MAIN COMMERCIAL ARM AND A WHOLLY OWNED SUBSIDIARY OF THE BRITISH BROADCASTING CORPORATION (BBC). OUR VISION IS TO BUILD THE BBC'S BRANDS, AUDIENCES, COMMERCIAL RETURNS AND REPUTATION ACROSS THE WORLD.
> BBC Worldwide helps keep the Licence Fee as low as possible, returning £222.2m to the BBC in the last financial year, an increase of 17.6% from 2014/15, adjusted for disposals, and equivalent to 13.0% of BBC Television content funding in the year.
Why, though, they don't duplicate the content with the IP-restriction instead of paywall/ads/whatever it is, I'm not quite sure.
Also relevant: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/299605105_The_Compu...
It's not exactly impossible that both arrived at something similar independently.
My mother in law makes ravioli by hand for special occasions:
* She mixes the flour, water and salt * That is then spread out into sheets with the help of a hand-cranked machine. * She then uses a cutting roller to cut those into the right shapes. * Then the filling (mix of greens) goes into each one by hand and it's closed up. * They get cooked. * At the end they get a healthy bunch of ragù (bolognese meat sauce, if you must) on them.
I feel guilty eating them, because it takes hours and hours to do all that, and then it's gone in a few minutes it seems like.
Pasta certainly isn't a staple of Finnish cuisine, but through family I have Italian relatives, and my parents have been making handmade pasta since before durum wheat was widely available here (it certainly was a very different world back then). Their hand cranked pasta machine has among other “heads” a tool for ravioli, taking in two sheets of pasta dough and automatically applying contents for each one it cuts. Certainly faster than filling them one by one, can't tell if you can taste the difference. (I really used to like pasta, shame that certain grains and I don't get well together.)
If you want to honor her time you shouldn't waste a moment on guilt, you should just let the taste of the pasta linger as long as you can, until it is interrupted by something else besides guilt!
You can get back all of those moments she put in by savoring the dish. That's the beauty of well made food: it will tell quite a story in your body if you let it.
Taste? It's delicious. The pasta is so thin that it really melts in your mouth. I've tasted it many times now and think that the trick is to not put in too much pecorino.
Sardo? As many Sardi on this thread have correctly pointed out, Sardo is a separate language from Italian, as opposed to a dialect. Like Italian, Romansch, and Spanish, it's rooted in Latin. There are many variations of it and each region speaks a different version. Barbaricino (what they speak around Nuoro) is considered the least Italian-ized version of it. There are more than 500 words that are nearly identical to Latin (domus, janna, etc) with more distant words (stemming from Sardinia's earliest indigenous population) that often refer to geological formations or animals (giara, marxani, nuraghe, etc).
Don't want the tradition to fade? Spread it as much as possible.
Here's Jamie Oliver attempting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHGZLjJ1CAk (this might be the video linked in the article, that one failed for me). It doesn't seem very easy.
It appears to be a normal pasta recipe. We know plain water is used. We don't know how heavily salted the salt water is.
Perhaps because I can't speak Italian, but I can't find a recipe. If they really want to preserve it they should probably start with that in multiple languages. Then at least we can experiment with the technique without having to make too many guesses.
I'm pretty sure we'd figure out the required elasticity fairly quickly.
> “There are only three ingredients: semolina wheat, water and salt,” Abraini said, vigorously kneading the dough back and forth. “But since everything is done by hand, the most important ingredient is elbow grease.”
> Abraini patiently explained how you work the pasta thoroughly until it reaches a consistency reminiscent of modelling clay, then divide the dough into smaller sections and continue working it into a rolled-cylindrical shape. Then comes the hardest part, a process she calls, “understanding the dough with your hands.” When she feels that it needs to be more elastic, she dips her fingers into a bowl of salt water. When it needs more moisture, she dips them into a separate bowl of regular water. “It can take years to understand,” she beamed. “It’s like a game with your hands. But once you achieve it, then the magic happens.”
> When the semolina reached just the right consistency, Abraini picked up the cylindrical strand to stretch and fold the dough, doubling it as she pressed the heads of the su filindeu into her palms. She repeated this sequence in a fluid motion eight times. With each sweeping pull, the dough became thinner and thinner. After eight sequences, she was left with 256 even strands about half as wide as angel-hair pasta. She then carefully laid the strands on a circular base, one on top of another, to form a cross, trimming any excess from the ends with her fingers before repeating the process over and over.
> When she’d formed three layers, she took the base outside to dry in the Sardinian sun. After several hours, the layers hardened into delicate sheets of white razor-thin threads resembling stitched lace. Abraini then broke the circular sheets into crude strips and packed them into boxes, ready for the San Francesco feast’s prior to place them in boiling sheep’s broth with grated pecorino and offer it as a thick soup to the pilgrims.
Even if we assume a standard pasta recipe, what's in the sheep broth!?
However she's not folding it eight times. A commenter on the video mentions that she's doing it wrong, strings are huge.
here's how to make that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auRNHI2nkIU
The pasta can be found at the San Francesco di Lula festival, which can be comfortably reached by car. Only a few pilgrims may do it on foot, some barefoot, as a form of devotion, but these days it's increasingly rarer
You can tell that Eliot is a pessimist; because if they couldn't design a mechanism to make this pasta on the first visit, it must be impossible!
Admittedly though, it does seem like a lot of work.
"Last year, a team of engineers from Barilla pasta came to see if they could reproduce her technique with a machine. They couldn’t"
When reading it, I thought about another HN post in which a Japanese classified cucumbers using deep learning and thought that maybe that could be applied too to get the right texture and moisture.
If new technology has to be developed to match the manual process, that's far a riskier proposition just for the purpose of adding yet another box of pasta in fancy grocery stores.
It probably makes far more sense, economically, for a small number of elite chefs to learn and replicate the technique for their restaurants. I am sure folks are trying.
My assumption was they didn't have an existing way to measure elasticity / water content on pasta that thin economically.
To your point, new tech == tell professors who might care and move on.
Why would you expect that? Many processes are resistant to automaton.
I would be surprised if it could be automated. The amount of nerves and muscles in the hands is enormous, and many of the materials have no artificial equivalents. Cameras don't even get you close because you need to see inside the dough to make measurements. And quite a lot of the process isn't observed at all, it's modeled in the chef's head and hands. Things like the ratio of muscles around her fingers encode reactions to data coming in from nerves. Very difficult to study let alone replicate. A process like hand pulled pasta seems like the absolute worst case for automation.
I posit that the ROI for such an endeavor would be disappointing in that all you will have is another type of fancy pasta. That would sort of take the magic and cache out of the dish as well.
>Recently, she’s begun making su filindeu for three restaurants in the area – and in the process, offering non-pilgrims a chance to taste it for the first time.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:_Uzr_k0...
For non uk people: """BBC Worldwide (International Site)
We're sorry but this site is not accessible from the UK as it is part of our international service and is not funded by the licence fee. It is run commercially by BBC Worldwide, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the BBC, the profits made from it go back to BBC programme-makers to help fund great new BBC programmes. You can find out more about BBC Worldwide and its digital activities at www.bbcworldwide.com. """
Some of the BBC websites that were previously blocked in the UK (such as Future and Earth) are now available because they don't show adverts to UK visitors.
Surely the same can be done for the Travel website (show adverts to everyone except UK visitors).
You see it every now and again when they want to apply even more rules to prevent the BBC making programmes they think might be successful/popular[1]
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/may/11/john-whittingd... (the best example I could find: government "forced to deny" what I suspect. Something something yes minister.)
Because the BBC can kiss my arse if it thinks anything it produces isn't mine.
Meanwhile, the top bureaucrats of ARD/ZDF earn salaries in the region of EUR 600000 per year.